Public Affairs

Mark Durkan

This month, Mark Durkan tells Meadhbh Monahan that while he has chosen three American history books, he also enjoys childhood adventure tales and political satire.

Boomsday Boomsday
AUTHOR:
Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley is probably the funniest author in the English language. ‘Boomsday’ is inspired by

Jonathan Swift’s ‘modest proposal’ where he suggested that the Irish eat their children. It’s about a young woman who is angry with her father’s generation of babyboomers because she is having to pay taxes for the squandering of that generation.

She blogs about the fact that instead of providing for the next generation, hers is the first that will rely on the next generation. She suggests that the government provide incentives for euthanasia at 75. He manages to make this controversial idea humorous because the idea is then taken up by a presidential candidate and it causes outcry from pro- life groups and others. While Buckley comes up with mad-cap scenarios, the issue in the story is more predictive than you think when you look at the raising of pension age and asking people to contribute more to their pensions.

His observatory humour is first-class, and while on holiday, I lent it to Energy and Communications Minister Eamon Ryan who also thought it was hilarious.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
AUTHOR:
Dee Brown

This is a powerful and moving history of the native American experience in the expanding United States of America. It chronicles how US expansion suppressed and conquered the native Americans and it also brings out so much of the special culture and spiritualisation of that race and their very special relationship with the land. When they saw the first Americans putting up fences, they couldn’t understand how anyone could own land because they felt that the land owned them.

By quoting native Indian tribe leaders from the time it is a very powerful and evocative read. I have American friends and they find it to be a real conscious prick. Where they celebrate the growth of the United States through immigration, this brings out the other side of the story about how the native Indians struggled with being vanquished and put off the land. I would defy anyone to read it and not be moved.

April 1865: The Month That Saved America April 1865: The Month That Saved America
AUTHOR:
Jay Winik

It’s a book that brings together a lot of different aspects of what was going on in the lead up to the end of the American Civil War. You get a lot of biography on the towering American, Abraham Lincoln [and it also] highlights incidences where, if different choices had been made, American history would have been very different. For example, a Confederate general had the potential to continue with the guerrilla warfare and chose not to.

It’s a very good readable history. I’m not someone who is into military logistics but this book combines the military history with the political history by telling you what was going on in the White House and Richmond, the seat of the Confederate.

The Defining Moment The Defining Moment
AUTHOR:
Jonathan Alter

This book deals with the Roosevelt’s rise and the New Deal but it also has a lot on the 1929 crash and the fact that the banks collapsed in the states, Britain and Europe but notably, not in Canada. It implies that Roosevelt didn’t cooperate or facilitate Hoover and in some ways left Hoover to stew.

The fact that Roosevelt dramatically arrived at a presidential convention in an aeroplane, while the meeting was still taking place, gave a sense that this was the start of the age of PR dramatics.

The book also tells us that the word ‘banksters’ was first used in 1932 by an Irish priest called Father Coughlan on a radio broadcast in Chicago while many people thought it was coined recently.

Huckleberry Finn Huckleberry Finn
AUTHOR:
Mark Twain

I have always liked this book from childhood and it still stands as a re-read. It’s a book of adventure with great observations of human nature and some great characterisations and dialogue. It exposes racism in a very poignant way but is full of advice and humour.

In a similar vein, a whimsical adventure, ‘Crock of Gold’ by James Stephens, is an adventure laced with humour and madness and all fantastical life is here.

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