Say Nothing My Brief Career In An Irish Asylum

Download or read book "Say Nothing"-My Brief Career in an Irish Asylum written by Christine Lacey and published by . This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: March 1994 and Dublin was buzzing. The Celtic Tiger was hovering on the edge of the city, breathing hot economic promises into the cool night air. The excitement was palpable and to a rule-abiding Yank, the Irish disdain for authority was irresistible. Christine's mid-life adventure, to seek a new existence in Ireland, was an ongoing conundrum to her friends and family, drawing a host of well-intentioned comments and one blinkered observation, "They speak English and you can figure out the money, where's the challenge in that?" On her first Sunday Holy Hour, she found herself inside O'Donoghue's pub on Baggot Street, listening to music, nursing one pint of Guinness and trying to ignore the second pint that had magically appeared behind it. From nowhere, a man jumped from the floor, onto the bar and "Riverdanced" between the pints, his dazzling feet meeting her gaze but missing her Guinness. She was mesmerized. Amid rampant applause, the dancer jumped from the bar to the floor allowing the drinking to continue and the barman to carry on. Seeing her with two full pints, the barman stopped. He picked up one and holding it in front of her, he scolded the novice punter, "Look here now," he said, "this is a living thing. It needs oxygen to survive and you're after killing it." Then he threw out the pint and replaced it with a new one. "I'm giving you one more chance, now drink!" And as she did, the source of the pint, a music-loving, poetry writing, Guinness guzzling, giant man from Donegal, nudged his stool next to hers. He raised his glass, "Slan," he said as the doors were locked for Holy Hour. ******************** Well and truly past her sell-by-date, Christine left Los Angeles for a job as a therapist in an ancient Irish asylum also known as Portrane. Sweetly duped by the gangly, tall, elderly interview chairman, his offer of employment came with a whiskey recommendation but omitted the word "asylum." It was her first exposure to their future conflict of cultures; Americans who can't shut up and the Irish, who provide only the most necessary of information; it's a skill honed from 800 years of English oppression, or so they say. Leo, her Irish-American neighbor, taught her his one abiding Irish rule; "Whatever you say, say nothing. Say nothing and you'll get along just fine." She understood. She would be that Yank that blended in, respected her new country, adopted its rules and adapted to its quirks. She would be Irish. She would say nothing. Leo's advice led her to believe that putting her rent money down a hole in the ground was normal. It wasn't. That all those lovely, chatty men in the pub were single. They weren't. That Portrane really wanted her expertise. It didn't. But the staff and the residents of Portrane; Anthony, Hugo, Kitty and Annie, who knew Portrane as their only home, taught her all about living in the asylum and seeing it as the home and the refuge that it was meant to be.

Download or read book Say Nothing written by Patrick Radden Keefe and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW AN FX LIMITED SERIES STREAMING ON HULU • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions. One of The New York Times’s 20 Best Books of the 21st Century "Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book—as finely paced as a novel—Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga." —New York Times Book Review "Reads like a novel ... Keefe is ... a master of narrative nonfiction. . .An incredible story."—Rolling Stone A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, and more! Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes. Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

Download or read book The Secret Scripture written by Sebastian Barry and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-06-12 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major motion picture starring Rooney Mara An epic story of family, love, and unavoidable tragedy from the two-time Booker Prize finalist and author of Old God's Time Sebastian Barry's novels have been hugely admired by readers and critics, and in 2005 his novel A Long Long Way was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In The Secret Scripture, Barry revisits County Sligo, Ireland, the setting for his previous three books, to tell the unforgettable story of Roseanne McNulty. Once one of the most beguiling women in Sligo, she is now a resident of Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital and nearing her hundredth year. Set against an Ireland besieged by conflict, The Secret Scripture is an engrossing tale of one woman's life, and a poignant story of the cruelties of civil war and corrupted power. The Secret Scripture is now a film starring Rooney Mara, Eric Bana, and Vanessa Redgrave.

Download or read book Stalking Irish Madness written by Patrick Tracey and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2008-08-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this powerful, sometimes harrowing, deeply felt story, Patrick Tracey journeys to Ireland to track the origin and solve the mystery of his Irish-American family's multigenerational struggle with schizophrenia. For most Irish Americans, a trip to Ireland is often an occasion to revisit their family's roots. But for Patrick Tracey, the lure of his ancestral home is a much more powerful need: part pilgrimage, part investigation to confront the genealogical mystery of schizophrenia–a disease that had claimed a great-great-great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and, most recently, two sisters. As long as Tracey could remember, schizophrenia ran on his mother's side, seldom spoken of outright but impossible to ignore. Devastated by the emotional toll the disease had already taken on his family, terrified of passing it on to any children he might have, and inspired by the recent discovery of the first genetic link to schizophrenia, Tracey followed his genealogical trail from Boston to Ireland's county Roscommon, home of his oldest-known schizophrenic ancestor. In a renovated camper, Tracey crossed the Emerald Isle to investigate the country that, until the 1960s, had the world's highest rate of institutionalization for mental illness, following clues and separating fact from fiction in the legendary relationship the Irish have had with madness. Tracey's path leads from fairy mounds and ancient caverns still shrouded in superstition to old pubs whose colorful inhabitants are a treasure trove of local lore. He visits the massive and grim asylum where his famine starved ancestors may have lived. And he interviews the Irish research team that first cracked the schizophrenic code to learn how much–and how little–we know about this often misunderstood disease. Filled with history, science, and lore, Stalking Irish Madness is an unforgettable chronicle of one man's attempt to make sense of his family's past and to find hope for the future of schizophrenic patients. From the Hardcover edition.

Download or read book The Gathering written by Anne Enright and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A crowd of siblings gathers in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother in this “stunning” novel by the award-winning author of Actress (The Washington Post). The surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering for the wake of their wayward, alcoholic brother, Liam, drowned in the sea after filling his pockets with stones. He is the third of the twelve Hegarty siblings to die. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him—something that happened in their grandmother’s house in the winter of 1968. As prize-winning author Anne Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations, her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light. The Gathering is an “wonderfully elegant and unsparing” epic of an Irish family (Los Angeles Times)—a novel about love and disappointment, how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars. “Entrancing…a haunting look at a broken family stifled by generations of hurt and disappointment, struggling to make peace with the irreparable.”—Entertainment Weekly “A melancholic love and rage bubbles just beneath the surface of this Dublin clan, and Enright explores it unflinchingly.”—Publishers Weekly “Her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott’s; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O’Brien’s. The Gathering is her best book.”—Colm Toibin “Hypnotic.”—Booklist (starred review)

Download or read book The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty written by Sebastian Barry and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Old God's Time (March 2023), Sebastian Barry's stunning new novel, available to pre-order now Following the end of the First World War, Eneas McNulty joins the British-led Royal Irish Constabulary. With all those around him becoming soldiers of a different kind, however, it proves to be the defining decision of his life when, having witnessed the murder of a fellow RIC policeman, he is wrongly accused of identifying the executioners. With a sentence of death passed over him he is forced to flee Sligo, his friends, family and beloved girl, Viv. What follows is the story of this flight, his subsequent wanderings, and the haunting pull of home that always afflicts him. Tender, witty, troubling and tragic, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty tells the secret history of a lost man.

Download or read book Hawthorn & Child written by Keith Ridgway and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-23 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mind-blowing adventure into a literary fourth dimension: part noir, part London snapshot, all unsettlingly amazing Hawthorn and his partner, Child, are called to the scene of a mysterious shooting in North London. The only witness is unreliable, the clues are scarce, and the victim, a young man who lives nearby, swears he was shot by a ghost car. While Hawthorn battles with fatigue and strange dreams, the crime and the narrative slip from his grasp and the stories of other Londoners take over: a young pickpocket on the run from his boss; an editor in possession of a disturbing manuscript; a teenage girl who spends her days at the Tate Modern; a pack of wolves; and a madman who has been infected by the former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Haunting these disparate lives is the shadowy figure of Mishazzo, an elusive crime magnate who may be running the city, or may not exist at all.