Award-winning, Independent Bookshop in South Dublin

The Company of Books is an award-winning, independent bookshop in Ranelagh, Dublin 6. We stock an extensive range of fiction, non-fiction and children’s books which are available in the shop and on our site. 

We Don't Know Ourselves

€15.00
Irish Book Awards
1
Product Details
ISBN: 9781784978341
Author: Fintan O'Toole
Format: Paperback

We Don’t Know Ourselves is a very personal vision of recent Irish history from the year of O’Toole’s birth, 1958, down to the present.

Ireland has changed almost out of recognition during those decades, and Fintan O’Toole’s life coincides with that arc of transformation. The book is a brilliant interweaving of memories (though this is emphatically not a memoir) and engrossing social and historical narrative. The disintegration of the old alliance of Catholic church and state is mapped in a series of dramatic episodes.

Certain themes recur – of things that were known but could never be acknowledged, of cruelty and corruption hidden in plain sight. This was the era of Eamon de Valera, Jack Lynch, Charles Haughey and John Charles McQuaid, of sectarian civil war in the North and the Pope’s triumphant visit in 1979, but also of those who began to speak out against the ruling consensus – feminists, advocates for the rights of children, gay men and women coming out of the shadows. There is a quiet and sober anger in O’Toole’s description of child abuse at every level of the state and educational system, the punishment of women as sexual beings, the IRA’s psychological ability to portray themselves as victims of a conflict in which they were the worst perpetrators, and the sheer arrogance of the church’s power.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand modern Ireland.

We Don't Know Ourselves
  

Awards

About The Company Of Books

The Company of Books opened at 96 Ranelagh Village in November 2009 and has been gathering good reviews and loyal customers since.  Country Finalist for Independent Bookshop of the Year 2021 (Booksellers Association) and Dublin Winner of An Post Bookshop of the Year.

We have an eclectic mix of fiction, non-fiction and children’s books offering something for everyone. Spot a review of a book you’d like to read? Contact us and if we don’t have it, we’ll order it for you.

We also sell book vouchers and a range of beautiful cards and stationery.

Independent bookshop
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