I loved this fast-paced, witty, moving account of Ireland’s recent history.
O’Toole is the kind of narrator you want to spend more time with. I admired the style of this fascinating memoir: O’Toole tracks the history of Ireland over the course of his lifetime, weaving together the personal with the political, economic, and cultural.
I’ve conducted research in Ireland since 2016. It’s a remarkable place, changing rapidly, full of contradictions and grappling with the darkness of its recent past. I loved O’Toole’s book because he made sense of these contradictions in lively and nuanced ways.
This book is the best of memoir, blending together a person’s experiences with their wider context to provide a rich narrative of a life.
Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government-in despair, because all the young people were leaving-opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society-perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history.
I love to study foreign languages and learn about their histories. I do not speak Chinese, but Jing Tsu’s book was fascinating and accessible anyway.
Her book is ambitious: she explores the history of modern China through the relationship between the Chinese language and communication technologies, like the telegram, the typewriter and the smartphone. As China changes, and its position in the world changes, these changes are reflected in efforts to make the Chinese language a global digital force.
I found the reading experience similar to studying a foreign language. It was challenging and brain-bending in parts, trying to get to grips with unfamiliar aspects of Chinese script or grammar, but ultimately it was rewarding and enriching.
A riveting, masterfully researched account of the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese language to the modern world, transforming China into a superpower in the process
What does it take to reinvent the world's oldest living language?
China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language - a…
I loved this propulsive and darkly comic novel about an American history professor who encounters Benzion Netanyahu (father of Benjamin) at a New England college in the 1950s. I was moved by the narrator’s reflections on Jewish life and identity in the USA.
The book is witty and surprising throughout. As an academic, I found the author’s skewering of academia’s pretentions to be sharply funny.
In light of the war in Gaza and ongoing debates about antisemitism on college campuses, I’ve been reflecting on this book because it confronts profound questions around Jewish identity and faith in diaspora. I plan to read it again soon, because I’m sure it will resonate differently in our current political context.
"Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever." —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review
Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the…
Abortion pills have made safe medication abortion possible for millions of people around the world, even in the most restrictive circumstances. In my book, I illustrate the profound, transformative promise of these pills—which are safe, effective, and responsible for a sharp decline in maternal mortality. Abortion Pills Go Global demonstrates that the widespread practice of self-managed medication abortion makes it more difficult for countries to enforce oppressive abortion laws and less willing to do so. It follows these pills as they are manufactured and then transported by feminist activists from India to Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland, and the United States. Ultimately, the growing availability of abortion pills in places with restrictive laws means more people have access to self-managed healthcare.
