Bitter Freedom: Ireland In A Revolutionary World 1918-1923 - Softcover

WALSH, Maurice

3.91

187 ratings by Goodreads

9780571243006: Bitter Freedom: Ireland In A Revolutionary World 1918-1923

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571243002 ISBN 13: 9780571243006

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2015

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Bitter Freedom is a new history of the Irish Revolution, placing Ireland in the global disorder born of the terrible slaughter of total war, as well as a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human face of the conflict. The Irish Revolution - the war between the British authorities and the newly-formed IRA - was the first successful revolt anywhere against the British Empire. But it was not alone. Nationalist movements across the world were fired by the American promise of self-determination. For too long, the story of Irish independence and its aftermath has been told within an Anglo-Irish context. Now, in a vividly written and compelling narrative, Maurice Walsh shows that Ireland was part of a civilisation in turmoil. A national revolution which captured worldwide attention from India to Argentina was itself profoundly shaped by international events, political, economic and cultural. In the era of Bolshevism and jazz, developments in Europe and America had a profound effect on Ireland, influencing the attitudes and expectations of combatants and civilians. The hopes, dreams and bitter disappointments of the revolutionary years affected everyone in Ireland whether they fought or not. Walsh also brings to life the experiences of Irish people removed from the fighting - the plays they went to, the exciting films they watched in the new cinemas and the books they read. But the price of freedom was partition, a devastating civil war and the daunting challenge of establishing a new nation in an uncertain world...

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About the Author:

Maurice Walsh is the author of The News from Ireland: Foreign Correspondents and the Irish Revolution, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year choice in 2008. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Europe. His essays, reviews, and reportage have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, the Dublin Review, and the New Statesman. He was Knight Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2001, Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, in 2010-11, and teaches journalism at Brunel University in London. He lives in Oxford.

Review:

“Bitter Freedom is a wonderfully involving work: vividly written, with a storyteller’s eye for human detail and a scholar’s sense of broader and deeper movements over time. Anyone interested in Irish history will find the book riveting.”
- Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea

“Maurice Walsh is a gifted writer with a novelist’s eye for the illuminating detail of everyday lives in extremis...The great strength of Walsh’s book is its breadth of vision. His book challenges parochial tendencies in the revolutionary story.”
- Prospect

“Maurice Walsh’s invigorating account of the revolution and its immediate aftermath starts after the Rising, and firmly locates the Irish crisis in the postwar Europe described by Thomas Masaryk as ‘a laboratory atop a vast graveyard’. Vivid and incisive, his approach highlights discontinuities and contradictions among the revolutionaries.”
- Spectator

“Maurice Walsh’s book is the most vivid and dramatic account of this epoch to date: if you want to feel the full horror of Bloody Sunday in Dublin and the ‘sacking’ of Balbriggan by the Black and Tans, this is the place to look.”
- Literary Review

“The great strength of this compelling book is that it manages to make large and abstract arguments while conveying a sense of the lived experience of the Irish revolution. With one hand, Maurice Walsh widens his lens, while simultaneously he applies a magnifying glass with the other. The result of this dexterity is an arresting set of Big Pictures interspersed with a sequence of vivid miniatures. Indeed, the particular originality of the work lies in the striking conjunction of images.”
- Tablet

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