Life Lessons: A Treasury of Conversations About Life

In Life Lessons, Rita de Brún interviews some of Ireland’s most interesting characters. From judges, politicians and diplomats, to poets, commentators and campaigners, the contributors to this book come from a wide range of backgrounds and inhabit all walks of life. Despite their differences, there are uniting forces. All are fired by a drive to be true to who they are and follow their passions. All have their own life lessons to impart.... As individuals we are all unique, but we are also very much the same. Our life circumstances and paths differ wildly, but behind the superficiality of class, status and wealth, most of us – at one time or another – ponder the same questions: what matters most, who are we at our very core and what has life taught us? In Life Lessons, which is composed of snippets of one-to-one conversations Rita de Brún had with twenty-one Irish women and men, the sameness and interconnectedness of us all becomes apparent, as does the inherent goodness, ordinariness, humbleness and spirituality that is central to the sheer extraordinariness of some of those that we admire the most.

Contributions from Willy Daly, Colm O’Gorman, Jimmy Goulding, Pat Byrne, John Carmody, Dr. Austin O’Carroll, Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, Catherine McGuinness, Eavan Boland, Sean Scully, Mark Patrick Hederman, Mary O’Rourke, Conor Walton, Sarah Benson, Paul Cooke, Christina Noble, Joanne O’Riordan, Richard Kearney, Dr Seán Donlon, Rebecca de Havalland and Marty Morrissey