Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind

Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind

Author: Maura O'Halloran

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-04-17

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0861712838

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In 1979, 24-year-old Maura O'Halloran left her waitressing job in Boston and began her study of Zen in Japan. Today she is revered as a Buddhist saint, and a statue in her honor stands at the monastery where she lived. This is the story of her journey.


Oh, Play That Thing

Oh, Play That Thing

Author: Roddy Doyle

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2011-12-14

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0307368971

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It's 1924, and New York is the centre of the universe. Henry Smart, on the run from Dublin, lands on his feet. After the 1916 Rebellion, Henry Smart is running from the Republicans for whom he committed murder and mayhem. Lying to the immigration officer, avoiding Irish eyes that might recognise him, hiding the photograph of himself with his wife because it shows a gun across his lap, he throws his passport into the river and forges a new identity. He's a handsome man with a sandwich board, behind which he stashes hooch for the speakeasies of the Lower East Side. He catches the attention of the mobsters who run the district and soon there are eyes on his back and men in the shadows. It is time to leave, for another America... The Depression is sending folks to ride the rails in search of a new life and new hope, and all trains lead to Chicago. As Henry’s past tries to catch up with him, he takes off on a journey to the great port, where music is everywhere. Chicago is wild and new, and newest of all is the music. Furious, wild, happy music played by a man with a trumpet and bleeding lips called Louis Armstrong. His music is everywhere, coming from every open door, every phonograph. But Armstrong is a prisoner of his colour; there are places a black man cannot go, things he cannot do. Armstrong needs a man, a white man, and the man he chooses is Henry Smart.


My Father Left Me Ireland

My Father Left Me Ireland

Author: Michael Brendan Dougherty

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0525538674

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The perfect gift for parents this Father’s Day: a beautiful, gut-wrenching memoir of Irish identity, fatherhood, and what we owe to the past. “A heartbreaking and redemptive book, written with courage and grace.” –J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy “…a lovely little book.” –Ross Douthat, The New York Times The child of an Irish man and an Irish-American woman who split up before he was born, Michael Brendan Dougherty grew up with an acute sense of absence. He was raised in New Jersey by his hard-working single mother, who gave him a passion for Ireland, the land of her roots and the home of Michael's father. She put him to bed using little phrases in the Irish language, sang traditional songs, and filled their home with a romantic vision of a homeland over the horizon. Every few years, his father returned from Dublin for a visit, but those encounters were never long enough. Devastated by his father's departures, Michael eventually consoled himself by believing that fatherhood was best understood as a check in the mail. Wearied by the Irish kitsch of the 1990s, he began to reject his mother's Irish nationalism as a romantic myth. Years later, when Michael found out that he would soon be a father himself, he could no longer afford to be jaded; he would need to tell his daughter who she is and where she comes from. He immediately re-immersed himself in the biographies of firebrands like Patrick Pearse and studied the Irish language. And he decided to reconnect with the man who had left him behind, and the nation just over the horizon. He began writing letters to his father about what he remembered, missed, and longed for. Those letters would become this book. Along the way, Michael realized that his longings were shared by many Americans of every ethnicity and background. So many of us these days lack a clear sense of our cultural origins or even a vocabulary for expressing this lack--so we avoid talking about our roots altogether. As a result, the traditional sense of pride has started to feel foreign and dangerous; we've become great consumers of cultural kitsch, but useless conservators of our true history. In these deeply felt and fascinating letters, Dougherty goes beyond his family's story to share a fascinating meditation on the meaning of identity in America.


How the Irish Saved Civilization

How the Irish Saved Civilization

Author: Thomas Cahill

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2010-04-28

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0307755134

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A book in the best tradition of popular history—the untold story of Ireland's role in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages settled on Europe. • The perfect St. Patrick's Day gift! Every year millions of Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they may not be aware of how great an influence St. Patrick was on the subsequent history of civilization. Not only did he bring Christianity to Ireland, he instilled a sense of literacy and learning that would create the conditions that allowed Ireland to become "the isle of saints and scholars"—and thus preserve Western culture while Europe was being overrun by barbarians. In this entertaining and compelling narrative, Thomas Cahill tells the story of how Europe evolved from the classical age of Rome to the medieval era. Without Ireland, the transition could not have taken place. Not only did Irish monks and scribes maintain the very record of Western civilization -- copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian, while libraries and learning on the continent were forever lost—they brought their uniquely Irish world-view to the task. As Cahill delightfully illustrates, so much of the liveliness we associate with medieval culture has its roots in Ireland. When the seeds of culture were replanted on the European continent, it was from Ireland that they were germinated. In the tradition of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, How The Irish Saved Civilization reconstructs an era that few know about but which is central to understanding our past and our cultural heritage. But it conveys its knowledge with a winking wit that aptly captures the sensibility of the unsung Irish who relaunched civilization.


With the End in Mind

With the End in Mind

Author: Kathryn Mannix

Publisher: Little, Brown Spark

Published: 2018-01-16

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 031650453X

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For readers of Atul Gawande and Paul Kalanithi, a palliative care doctor's breathtaking stories from 30 years spent caring for the dying. Modern medical technology is allowing us to live longer and fuller lives than ever before. And for the most part, that is good news. But with changes in the way we understand medicine come changes in the way we understand death. Once a familiar, peaceful, and gentle -- if sorrowful -- transition, death has come to be something from which we shield our eyes, as we prefer to fight desperately against it rather than accept its inevitability. Dr. Kathryn Mannix has studied and practiced palliative care for thirty years. In With the End in Mind , she shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying, and makes a compelling case for the therapeutic power of approaching death not with trepidation, but with openness, clarity, and understanding. Weaving the details of her own experiences as a caregiver through stories of her patients, their families, and their distinctive lives, Dr. Mannix reacquaints us with the universal, but deeply personal, process of dying. With insightful meditations on life, death, and the space between them, With the End in Mind describes the possibility of meeting death gently, with forethought and preparation, and shows the unexpected beauty, dignity, and profound humanity of life coming to an end.


After Ireland

After Ireland

Author: Declan Kiberd

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-01-08

Total Pages: 555

ISBN-13: 0674976568

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Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people’s faith in their institutions and thrown the nation’s struggle for independence into question. While Declan Kiberd explores how political failures and economic globalization have eroded Irish sovereignty, he also sees a way out of this crisis. After Ireland surveys thirty works by modern writers that speak to worrisome trends in Irish life and yet also imagine a renewed, more plural and open nation. After Dublin burned in 1916, Samuel Beckett feared “the birth of a nation might also seal its doom.” In Waiting for Godot and a range of powerful works by other writers, Kiberd traces the development of an early warning system in Irish literature that portended social, cultural, and political decline. Edna O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Hartnett lamented the loss of the Irish language, Gaelic tradition, and rural life. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eavan Boland grappled with institutional corruption and the end of traditional Catholicism. These themes, though bleak, led to audacious experimentation, exemplified in the plays of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy and the novels of John Banville. Their achievements embody the defiance and resourcefulness of Ireland’s founding spirit—and a strange kind of hope. After Ireland places these writers and others at the center of Ireland’s ongoing fight for independence. In their diagnoses of Ireland’s troubles, Irish artists preserve and extend a humane culture, planting the seeds of a sound moral economy.


Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment

Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment

Author: James M. Smith

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2007-09-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0268182183

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The Magdalen laundries were workhouses in which many Irish women and girls were effectively imprisoned because they were perceived to be a threat to the moral fiber of society. Mandated by the Irish state beginning in the eighteenth century, they were operated by various orders of the Catholic Church until the last laundry closed in 1996. A few years earlier, in 1993, an order of nuns in Dublin sold part of their Magdalen convent to a real estate developer. The remains of 155 inmates, buried in unmarked graves on the property, were exhumed, cremated, and buried elsewhere in a mass grave. This triggered a public scandal in Ireland and since then the Magdalen laundries have become an important issue in Irish culture, especially with the 2002 release of the film The Magdalene Sisters. Focusing on the ten Catholic Magdalen laundries operating between 1922 and 1996, Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment offers the first history of women entering these institutions in the twentieth century. Because the religious orders have not opened their archival records, Smith argues that Ireland's Magdalen institutions continue to exist in the public mind primarily at the level of story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archival history and documentation). Addressed to academic and general readers alike, James M. Smith's book accomplishes three primary objectives. First, it connects what history we have of the Magdalen laundries to Ireland's “architecture of containment” that made undesirable segments of the female population such as illegitimate children, single mothers, and sexually promiscuous women literally invisible. Second, it critically evaluates cultural representations in drama and visual art of the laundries that have, over the past fifteen years, brought them significant attention in Irish culture. Finally, Smith challenges the nation—church, state, and society—to acknowledge its complicity in Ireland's Magdalen scandal and to offer redress for victims and survivors alike.


A Star Called Henry

A Star Called Henry

Author: Roddy Doyle

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2010-06-04

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0307375382

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An historical novel like none before it, A Star Called Henry has marked a new chapter in Booker Prize-winner Roddy Doyle's writing. A subversive look behind the legends of Irish republicanism, at its centre a passionate and unforgettable love story, this novel is a triumphant work of fiction. Born in the slums of Dublin in 1902, his father a one-legged whorehouse bouncer and settler of scores, Henry Smart has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he's out robbing, begging, charming, often cold, always hungry, but a prince of the streets. At fourteen, already six foot two, Henry's in the General Post Office on Easter Monday 1916, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army, fighting for freedom. A year later he's ready to die for Ireland again, a rebel, a Fenian, and, soon, a killer. With his father's wooden leg as his weapon, Henry becomes a republican legend - one of Michael Collins' boys, a cop killer, an assassin on a stolen bike, a lover.


How to Stop Negative Thoughts

How to Stop Negative Thoughts

Author: Barbara Ireland

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-07-29

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 9781535089548

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TRAIN YOUR MIND TO BE YOUR GREATEST ALLY, INSTEAD OF YOUR SABOTEUR We think 60,000 thoughts a day. And yet, scientific research tells us a whopping 70% of those thoughts are negative. No wonder stress, social anxiety, depression, and unhappiness are on the rise! If you want to stop that incessant, negative voice in your head, read this book. One night in 2010, author Barbara Ireland was singing onstage with Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam when she suddenly "heard" her own inner thoughts. She was shocked at how self-critical they were and wondered: "Are these negative thoughts going through my head all the time?" Turns out they were - and they'd been sabotaging her life for years. We all think negative thoughts. We dwell on past conflicts, we worry, we wonder if we're good enough, we judge others, fume, resent, envy, compare. We spill some orange juice and yell in our heads, "You're such an idiot!" Sound familiar? What you may not realize is just how damaging that negative voice is. Repetitive, negative thoughts - "Mind Loops" - increase stress, deplete your energy, interrupt your sleep, make you less productive - and can trigger destructive emotions like fear, jealousy, and shame. Your relationships, career and self-esteem suffer. Tragically, Mind Loops can also sabotage you from achieving your most cherished dreams and goals because they create self-doubt with their mantras: "You aren't good enough," "You can't do it," and "Why try?" But there is a way to interrupt repetitive, negative thoughts. Based on neuroscience, Ireland's proven "4 D's of De-Looping" program will show you how to: * catch, and detach from, negative thoughts before they have a chance to hook you * heal and free yourself from painful memories - no matter how long ago they occurred * reframe life's challenges so you can let go of resentments, stress, and worry * literally re-wire your brain of its negative messages to free up energy to pursue your life's goals. Your confidence, peace of mind, and happiness will finally have a chance to thrive. The techniques in this book have transformed many people's lives. They can transform yours, too. "From singer and bassist, filmmaker and now author, Barbara Ireland, comes an inspired book that begins to translate the science of negative thinking and neural pathways for those of us without Ph.D's." - Stone Gossard, Pearl Jam "In the concept of Mind Loops, Barbara Ireland has identified the source of negativity, depression, and paralyzing feelings that undermine our dreams and well-being. In a sweeping act of creative genius she has distilled a number of simple remedies that will work for anyone willing to use them." -Wayne Lehrer, author, "The Prodigy Within" "Barbara's program gives you a road map and action plan to remove repetitive, negative thoughts from your life. I was able to fulfill a lifelong dream that was plagued by severe insecurities, anxiety and self-doubt due to the techniques found in Barbara's book. I highly recommend it!" -Amy W., Seattle, WA Two Free Bonuses Come With This Book! * A companion Mind Loops Workbook * An mp3 audiobook of Ireland reading, "The 7-Day Mental Diet: How To Change Your Life In a Week" by Dr. Emmet Fox - an inspiring and motivational "read" to start your program!