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.
Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole
served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school,
much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns
suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far
from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef
and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down
Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come.
O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful
Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of
ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific
violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish
to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became
a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be
martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the
emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven
by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward
particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis. A remarkably
compassionate yet exacting observer, O'Toole in coruscating prose
captures the peculiar Irish habit of "deliberate unknowing," which
allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the
foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don't
Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history
that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of
us.
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