100 Books Like Ireland

This is a little historical gem. The author was the wife of the British consul to Constantinople in 1718 and wrote copious letters home detailing her travels and her life in the Ottoman Empire’s capital. She describes the exoticism, the requirement that women be veiled in public (which she saw as freeing), the sumptuous jewels and wealth, the admiration of pregnant women (and the pressure to be pregnant to prove you were still young).   

Her description of smallpox ‘parties’ is particularly interesting. These gatherings were held annually to inoculate children by using a tiny amount of smallpox pus scratched into the forearm. A survivor of smallpox herself, Mary had her own small son successfully inoculated and brought the knowledge back with her to England, but it was not until Edward Jenner introduced a vaccine later in the century that a treatment became more widely known.

This is an intriguing account of a lesser known period in Irish History, an unusual focus on a surprisingly successful and wealthy time. Stopford Greene was an Anglo-Irish historian, the daughter of a Protestant Archdeacon and the granddaughter of a Bishop. In this remarkable book, using material contemporaneous with her chosen period, she explores the centuries after Ireland had recovered from the Norman Invasion when it had developed a rich and sophisticated society and a thriving trade with the Continent of Europe. All of this ended with the devastation of the Tudor conquest and England’s subsequent genocidal policies.

A committed nationalist, Alice paid from her own pocket for the guns which were run into Howth Harbour in 1914 to help with the Rising.

The fascination of this book is its portrayal of the human cost involved in the fall of a civilisation. After the Bolshevik Revolution the cream of Russian society, including most of the aristocrats, the professional classes, the officer class, the middle class, fled Russia with little but the clothes on their backs. Being Francophone, most of them sought refuge in Paris only to find there destitution. Grand Dukes who formerly had palaces, country estates and scores of servants, now drove taxis, waited at table, washed dishes; Grand Duchesses embroidered for fashion houses (the lucky ones), all yearning for their homeland and being, as time passed, regarded with less and less tolerance by the French.  

The book is a reminder that catastrophe waits only for opportunity.

Susan Nagel charted Marie-Thérèse's life during the turmoil of the French Revolution. The only survivor of the royal family locked in Temple Prison, despite the harrowing experience of her family’s demise and the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette’s daughter emerged as a remarkably strong figure in French history.

Marie-Thérèse journeyed from the horrors of the Temple prison and her family’s death to a dignified role at court when she married her cousin and the monarchy returned after the Revolution and Napoleon’s empire. I was amazed at how little I knew about Marie-Thérèse—she was even queen for 20 minutes when her husband reigned and abdicated!

Like his classic Democracy in America, 19th-century French author Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of the great movement for freedom in his own country raises profound questions about the difficult relationship between liberty and equality. Modern scholarship has challenged some of Tocqueville’s assertions, but his warning that events often turn out very differently from what the actors in them intended is as relevant today as it was when his book was first published in 1856.

De Tocqueville’s book is the first and probably still the best examination of the genius of America. At times like these, it's good to be reminded of what makes America work. Frankl would firmly understand and concur. The essence of America is our responsibility. Frankl would break it up into two words: “response-ability.”

I first read this book when I was in college. I have read it at least once in every subsequent year. It’s nice to be reminded of who we are. Ultimately, De Tocqueville teaches that this country will be whatever we make it. If we don’t like what’s going on, it’s our responsibility to change it.  

Kronman is particularly good at describing the “tough” reasoning skills that underlie the thinking styles that have produced modern science and modern democracies. An example of these tough skills is what he calls the “ethic of depersonalization”: expressing arguments in a form available to all—a form not dependent on our emotions or personal experience. Identity politics, in contrast, gives weight to immutable demographic characteristics in ongoing political conversations.  It thus reverses centuries of progress in the intellectual march toward open, ecumenical inquiry, where personal characteristics do not trump rational argument.

And no such list is complete without Alexis de Tocqueville's classic from the 19th century, Democracy in America. Weighing in just two pages short of Don Quixote's 937 (paperback both, the ECCO Grossman Quixote translation and the Penguin Gerald Bevan de Tocqueville edition), Tocqueville ponders a question most of us contemplate and plenty of us act on: "Why Americans are so restless in the midst of their prosperity..."

A collection of essays about “classic” works of history by (mostly) European historians ranging from Edward Gibbon to Jacob Burckhardt, Clive’s book brings these works to life even for readers unfamiliar with them. Clive’s short but rich essays on these historians provide a wonderful introduction to both their writings and to the study of historiography more generally, showing the value of these classic texts as works of literature and as gateways into the worlds of their authors.

This is the book to read if you are young or seeking something for a young reader.

The suffering and endurance of ordinary men women and children during those terrible years is described with empathy and admiration. It is also, as the book description states, "the story of the heroes among the Irish people and how they held on to hope."