Finally got around to reading “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee”. Very very good. I believe @Kyle was a fan back in the day
1 Like
Very good book
1 Like
Picked it up and read while I was travelling across the USA a couple of years ago. Put perspective on things.
1 Like
I was thinking of reading the Third Policeman again. Haven’t read it since I was a teenager. Originally read it because Phil Lynott said it was his favourite book in an interview. I was young and impressionable.
1 Like
I’ve never read it.
I think the plot of the TV show Lost was inspired by it
1 Like
It’s not as good as At-Swim-Two-Birds for me.
I think it was before than The Third Policeman so you might say I prefer O’Brien’s earlier stuff.
2 Likes
Published posthumously I understand from Google after it was rejected and he claimed to have lost manuscript to spare his humiliation.
At-Swim-Two-Birds is a masterpiece,
Probably the best book I have ever read. Clearly coming from a mind that was brilliant,
The Third Policeman is similar but even more out there. An excellent book worth reading if you’re into avant garde which I am.
1 Like
Guys, don’t get into comparing O’Nolan’s books. They are incomparable. Their own separate, unique universes. Just enjoy them for what they are.
@TheUlteriorMotive you’re about to have the literary time of your life.
2 Likes
Got a present of this. Finished it yesterday. Beautifully written book and a must read for anyone with a passing interest in jazz. Deals with the lead up to the recording of A Kind of Blue and its aftermath through the lives of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans. There’s a lot of drugs, mostly heroin and the character flaws of the three protagonists aren’t sugar coated.
To put the tin hat on it I went into the independent record shop in town, Luca, in the afternoon and found three second hand vinyls by Dave Brubeck, Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis in impeccable nick. Yer man gave me the three of them for €50. 
8 Likes
I’ll be buying that, I find Miles Davis to be an utterly compelling and fascinating character - and then throw in Coltrane and Evans for good measure.
1 Like
As I say if you have any interest at all in the subject you will likely love it. It’s one of those books I slowed down reading towards the end because I didn’t want to finish it. If you want my copy send me a pm and I’ll send it on to you.
1 Like
Bad Investment Money: A Story of Humanity
By David McWilliams (Simon & Schuster 416pp £25)
This review will be an all-round dis- appointment. It will, and indeed should, disappoint David McWilliams. He deserves no less. But it will also, I fear, disappoint readers of Literary Review , thirsters for knowledge as they are. Be- cause I cannot begin to describe what the author’s argument might be, or indeed why this book exists at all. I think that either Mr Simon or Mr Schuster must have nodded off when the manuscript came in.
Many people, including my late mother, have uttered the wise saw ‘if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.’ Google tells me that the fount of this wisdom is a rabbit called Thumper in the film Bambi. That seems a doubtful source, but let it pass. So what nice words would Thumper have found to say about Money?
Well, to start with, it will only set you back £25, when hardbacks of this kind are increasingly converging on a £30 price point. So if you choose to read it you will have a fiver left for a restorative glass of wine at the end of your ordeal. But surely there’s some more value to be had from four hundred or so pages?
The format is a series of roughly chronological chapters. The book opens in the Congo in 18,000 BC and ends in present-day Africa, passing through ancient Greece, 18th-century France, Weimar
Germany and the Irish financial crisis of 2008 (McWilliams is based in Dublin and worked briefly for the Central Bank of Ireland thirty years ago).
The chapters are written in a downhome, chatty style. Money features in most of them, though in some cases t. The theme seems to be, as McWilliams says i, ‘mess with money and you mess with far more than the price system, inflation and economics – you mess with people’s heads.’ If that is the sort of demotic prose you like, you will like this sort of thing. If not, well, you won’t. I position myself firmly in the second category.
Inevitably, some of the chapters are hard for any single reviewer to evaluate knowledgeably. They range very widely through time and geography. One has to take the author’s word for the attitude to money of a man called Kushim living in Mesopotamia more than five thousand years ago, who stars in the second chapter. Similarly, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of a chapter entitled, for no very obvious reason, ‘Was Midas framed?’ It ’s a poser, albeit not a very interesting one, but I have no view on it at this distance.
As we come closer to the present day, it becomes easier to offer an opinion. There is a competent and lively description of John Law’s Mississippi Company scheme – a close cousin of the South Sea Bubble – which bankrupted the French state in the early 18th century, though it would have been better had he consulted James Buchan’s 2018 biography of Law, which has revised our view of the motives and methods of that Scottish adventurer.
The one chapter which Thumper would certainly have enjoyed is on The Wizard of Oz. The story is a familiar one, but McWilliams explains the allegories competently. The Yellow Brick Road represents the gold standard and the Cowardly Lion stands for William Jennings Bryan, a presidential candidate who advocated bimetallism, according to which the addition of silver to the money stock would liberate the Tin Man (the industrial worker) from the tight constraints of the gold standard.
But, even channelling one’s inner Thumper, it is hard to be positive about the chapter on Alexander Hamilton, which notes that he set up the Bank of the United States, America’s first central bank, but not that Congress let it close when its twenty-year charter expired. It ’s a complicated story, poorly told here.
It is hard to know what to make of a chapter on Roger Casement and his work for the British government exposing the sins of those who exploited the Belgian Congo. It allows McWilliams to digress onto the evils of imperialism. He describes Britain as ‘the world’s most rapacious imperialist, the country that over the previous 300 years has plundered more money out of its colonies than any other’. I am not disposed to defend the British Empire, but there are no numbers, no analysis and no comparators to justify that assertion. And he contrives to throw in just one sentence on the Boer War, which refers to ‘the intimidation and brutality meted out by British forces in South Africa’. As a summary of that complex conflict, it lacks a little something. Furthermore, quite what it has to do with the history of money is not evident.
Warming to his theme, McWilliams summarises the post-First World War settlement as ‘crestfallen Britain … punishing the embryonic and fragile Weimar Republic’ because she was no longer ‘top dog of global money’. At that point I began to lose the will to live. There is only so much saloon bar cod history a man can take in one sitting.
5 Likes
I picked that up in O’Mahonys the other day and glanced through it, thought it seemed interesting, I left it behind me, will wait for the library
I wish he’d let us know what he really feels about the book.
Headshot delivered to Macker
I must book a ticket for Kilkenomics to jeer at McWilliams
This is excellent retelling of the murder and eventually trial of Aaron Brady for the killing of Adrian Donohue
