For the Cause of Liberty: A Thousand Years of Ireland's Heroes

by Terry Golway

Book Overview

Ireland's struggle for freedom reaches back much further into the annals of history than most of us can imagine. Since the eleventh century, when legendary king Brian Boru united the chieftains of Ireland to resist Viking invasion, countless individual leaders have fought to preserve and protect Ireland's political and cul-tural autonomy. In a chronicle of unprecedented breadth and authority, For the Cause of Liberty tells the stories of these...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684855577
• ISBN13: 9780684855578
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Book on Irish History

Golway has a very easy to read writing style. He gives seemingly very intimate details about each person he talks about, and also gives you alot of background information that you might miss in other books. In some parts of it, you can almost imagine that the heros of old are still alive and fighting for freedom.He covers more about history 1850 onwards than previously, but he gives fair time to both of them. A fascinating book for anyone who wants to know about Ireland, or the history of Revolutions in the world.

Facinating account from the past to the present.

It's amazing that Golway put so much information in such a little space, complete with pictures of all his subjects. An excellent account of Irish history through the personalities that made it. Most of the book covers the 19th and 20th centuries but most of the changes took place in that era. I thought I knew everything about Ireland but I was sure wrong. This book also reads like a novel which makes it even better. I can't wait to read his book on John Devoy.

The Art of Story Telling and History

Incredibly interesting book to learn how Ireland and its politics got to where they are today. Its not just religion in the sense of Protestant vs. Catholic. Its cultural going back to the 5th century and the difference between Tribal culture of the Celts, the Northern European Culture of Normans and English, and the arrogance of the Papacy. Golway packs it all into a relatively short book that reads like a novel.

A Book To Get Your Irish Up

One of the problems with Irish history is that it is so complicated. The command structures of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the Uprising in 1916 can be traced to the Fenians of 1867. Even today, the events that led to the Belfast agreement can be found in the seeds that the Irish Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, planted in the mid-1960s. Irish history is so convoluted that it is almost impossible for the average reader to sort out who was on what side during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Indeed, it is impossible to tell your average Irish revolutionary without the proverbial scorecard.Finally someone has created the scorecard that sorts out this glorious mess known as Irish history. His name is Terry Golway and the book is For the Cause of Liberty: A Thousand Years of Ireland's Heroes. This is a book for not only the informed reader, but for the neophyte. Names that are legend in history such as Pearse, Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott and James Connolly, with Golway's help, finally become fresh and blood men. Icons found in the pages of Yeats ("MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connolly and Pearse") become men with a political agenda, whose sole aim is to bait the British into executing them. The Irish revolution is great drama: a David and Goliath battle that ends in disaster; 16 executions, and the start of one of the bloodiest guerilla wars in the history of the 20th century. Heroes abound: Pearse, the enigmatic poet, the "Provisional President" of the new "Republic"; Connolly, the socialist, who the British would have to shoot in a chair because of his wounds; Tom Clarke, always referred to as "the old Fenian" although only 55-years-old, is the master-mind as he gets even for all the years he rotted in British jails.Although the year 1916 has been lionized, the revolutionary was actually won in 1920 under the brilliant direction of Michael Collins. Eamon DeValera was in America raising funds as Collins and his intelligence unit, known as the "Twelve Apostles," moved in on the British Secret Service. It would all coalesce on November 21, 1920-Bloody Sunday-when Collins' squad assassinated the entire British Secret Service in Dublin. A truce soon followed, which was in turn followed by the infamous treaty negotiated by Collins that split the island into the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland.Golway has come up with many historic gems that will delight the aficionado of Irish history. Everyone knows that Eamon DeValera was spared execution in 1916 because he was a natural-born American citizen. Did you know that the British did, indeed, execute an American national? Do you know which one of the 16 men was the American? Give up? Try Tom Clarke, naturalized in Brooklyn in 1885. Only one of Collins' shooters on Bloody Sunday went on to become Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland and it wasn't DeValera. Try Sean Lemass, who would greet President Kennedy on his historic visit to Ireland in 1963. Golway a

The BEST One-Volume History of Irish Nationalism Available

One of the most endearing aspects of this fine book is its compactness -- just 335 pages to tell the saga of Ireland's 1000-year struggle for freedom. Far more important, however, is the focus of the book -- not on the often dreary minutiae of Anglo-Irish politics, but rather on the people, the men and women who have arisen generation after generation in Irish history to champion the cause of freedom. It's history through biography and done with a historian's attention to detail and a journalist's sense of style. It is, quite simply put, THE BEST one-volume history of Irish nationalism around.