Kevin C. Kearns

Kevin Kearns once again mines his trove of first-person interviews -- you'll see the same Northside characters in this book as you do in others -- to look at the frantic weeks Ireland suffered in the winter of 1947 when a crippling series of blizzards and cold weather paralyzed the country. You do get a sense of how thin were the margins that Ireland was operating on in the post-war era, even though it hadn't suffered badly in the war. There's an interesting series of observations on the actions - or inactions - of the de Valera government, though surprisingly there's no indication of whether the handling of the crisis had an effect on the following year's election, which finally ousted de Valera after a long stretch. For fans of Irish history.… (mehr)

I'd known about this event from my mother, who was living in Tempelogue (South Dublin) at the time as a five-and-a-quarter year old. She'd heard the planes, and was worried about them, before being sent back to bed. This is an in-depth look at the bombing itself, with some backtracking to previous bombing incidents by the Luftwaffe, as well as the portentous assistance P.M. de Valera gave Northern Ireland during a bombing of Belfast. Kearns appears to mine a vast trove of interviews he has with Northsiders -- you see the same characters turn up here as in some of his other books. Amazingly, it shows that de Valera's government did not do all it could have done, and yet Finna Fail did hang on to government in the '43 elections. An interesting book.… (mehr)