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We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland
Fintan O'Toole
Fintan O'Toole's *We Don't Know Ourselves* pulls off a rare trick: it tells the story of a whole country through the accident of one life. O'Toole, Ireland's most prominent public intellectual and a longtime *Irish Times* columnist, was born in 1958, the year Ireland's government first set out to modernize a poor, insular, priest-dominated state. Braiding memoir with national history, he charts the astonishing transformation that followed — economic, sexual, religious, moral — from his own working-class Dublin childhood to the collapse of Church authority and the arrival of a confident, secular, globalized Ireland. It won the An Post Irish Book of the Year in 2021 and landed on the *New York Times*'s ten best books list. Sharp, funny, and unsparing, it is among the best single books on how modern Ireland became itself.
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The author
Fintan O'Toole, born in Dublin in 1958, is a critic, columnist for The Irish Times, and one of Ireland's most influential commentators. His journalism has earned him the Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize, and he writes with the same combination of moral seriousness and mordant wit here.
The book
Published in 2021, We Don't Know Ourselves is subtitled a personal history of modern Ireland, and it means both words. O'Toole uses the frame of his own life, beginning in 1958, to track Ireland's wrenching passage from poverty and clerical control to prosperity and secularism — taking in emigration, the Troubles, economic boom and bust, and the scandals that broke the Catholic Church's grip. Memoir and reportage keep the sweeping history grounded in lived detail.
How it reads
It reads like the best long-form journalism: propulsive, funny, and quietly devastating. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic embraced it — it took the An Post Irish Book of the Year award and a place on the New York Times's ten best books of the year — and it has quickly become a standard account of the period.
For more context
Readers wanting the longer backstory can turn to Roy Foster's histories of modern Ireland; those wanting more O'Toole will find the same voice across decades of his Irish Times columns.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Fintan O'Toole
- Publisher
- Liveright (W. W. Norton)
- Year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 978-1-63149-653-0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine
Places