Life is a journey. Often times and without choice, our actions and interactions within the environments in which we grow, live, work, and play, define our worldviews and shape who we are. Anyone who has faced traumatic events may look for an outlet to share their experiences in the hopes they are not alone in their struggles. In hindsight, however, the realization is that we are all human, and each and every one of us has a unique story to tell.
John Chambers was brought up on Belfast's notorious Loyalist Glencairn estate, during the height of the Troubles. From an early age he witnessed violence, hatred and horror as Northern Ireland tore itself apart in civil strife. Kneecapping, brutal murders, and even public tarring-and-feathering were simply a fact of life for the children on the estate. He thought he knew which side he was on, but although raised as a Loyalist, he was hiding a troubling secret: that his disappeared mother - whom he'd always been told was dead - was a Roman Catholic, 'the enemy'. In a memoir of rare power, John explores the dark heart of Northern Irish sectarianism in the seventies and eighties. With searing honesty and native Belfast wit, he describes the light and darkness of his unique childhood, and his teenage journey through mod culture and ultra-Loyalism, before an escape from Belfast to London - where, still haunted by the shadow of his fractured family history - he began a turbulent and hedonistic adulthood. A Belfast Child is a tale of divided loyalties, dark secrets and the scars left by hatred and violence on a proud city - but also a story of hope, healing and ultimate redemption for a family caught in the rising tide of the Troubles.
The death of a baby, whether through miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal loss, or the death of an older child, is the worst experience a parent can endure. This book includes twenty-six heart-wrenchingly honest essays by parents who convey their personal challenges and the ways they coped during the first twelve months of child loss.
Romantic Ireland is definitely dead and gone. With the exhilarating Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson cheerfully and obscenely sends it to its grave. Jake Jackson, his thoughtful anti-hero, finds Belfast's tragedies are built on comedy: Catholics and Protestants so intent on declaring their differences "resembled no one now as much as they resembled each other…. That was what I liked about Belfast hatred. It was a lumbering hatred that could survive completely on the memories of things that never existed in the first place." He spends a certain amount of time worrying about seeming too Catholic and an equal amount worrying about not seeming sufficiently Catholic. Sometimes, after several drinks, Jake forgets that he's not a Protestant. Each position is as dangerous, and absurd, as the other. His best friend is less torn up. Chuckie Lurgan is a chubby Methodist whose only accomplishments so far have been shaking Reagan's hand, appearing in the same photo as the Pope, and having "an intense and troubling relationship with mail-order catalogues." But Chuckie suddenly surprises Jake with his first entrepreneurial scheme. Though he's placed an ad for an enormous sex toy in Northern Ireland's "only mucky paper," he hasn't any intention of ever fulfilling an order. Instead, he follows legal protocol and sends each disappointed customer a refund check, in the proper amount, stamped GIANT DILDO REFUND. The gamble is that most people will be too embarrassed to cash them. "Chuckie smiled the smile of the just-published poet." And soon he has more than 40,000 pounds in the bank and a lust for big money. He also has a rich, new girlfriend: "He hoped his dreams wouldn't suffer from all this reality."Jake is more preoccupied with the day-to-day. His construction site job gives him ample opportunity to consider his romantic failures and the ever-present symbols of war. There's also a new graffito that has sprouted among the various deadly acronyms. IRA, UVF, and UDA make no more sense than OTG, but at least everyone knows what they stand for. OTG becomes a puzzle to all of Belfast--is it, the authorities wonder, a new terrorist group? (Jake also notes several other phrases, FTP, FTQ, and FTNP--the "T" stands for the and "P" and "Q" for Pope and Queen. The "N" is for Next.) Despite his love for Belfast, Jake loses heart with its zealots and fanatics and, halfway through, Eureka Street threatens to slide into windy bathos. It's only a momentary lapse amid energetic, colloquial poetry and comic realism.
Born in Belfast during World War II, raised in a working-class Protestant family, and educated on scholarship at Queen's University, writer Stewart Parker's story is in many ways the story of his generation. Other aspects of his personal history, though, such as the amputation of his left leg at age 19, helped to create an extraordinarily perceptive observer and commentator. Steeped in American popular culture as a child and young adult, he spent five years teaching in the United States before returning to Belfast in August 1969, the same week British troops responded to sectarian disturbances there. Parker had developed a sense of writing as a form of political action in the highly charged atmosphere of the US in the late 1960s, which he applied in many and varied capacities throughout the worst years of the Troubles to express his own socialist and secular vision of Northern Irish potential. As a young aspiring poet and novelist, he supported himself with free-lance work that brought him into contact with institutions ranging from BBC Northern Ireland to the Irish Times (for which he wrote personal columns and the music review feature High Pop) and from the Queen's University Extramural Department to Long Kesh internment camp (where his creative writing students included Gerry Adams). It is as a playwright, however, that Parker earned a permanent spot in the literary canon with drama that encapsulates his experience of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Marilynn Richtarik's Stewart Parker: A Life illuminates the genesis, development, and meaning of such classic plays as Spokesong, Northern Star, and Pentecost - works that continue to shed light on the North's past, present, and future - in the context of Parker's life and times. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, this critical biography rewards general readers and specialists alike.
