Off the Shelf - Series: October 2006

Click on a date to listen to the show.

Programme 37: 30th June 2007
Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma

This week, on Off the Shelf Andy O'Mahony discusses Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma. On a cold November day in Amsterdam, Mohammed Bouyeri shot and killed the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, for making with the Somali-born Dutch politician, Ayaan Hersi Ali, a movie that 'blasphemed' Islam. After Bouyeri shot van Gogh, he calmly stood over the body and cut his throat with a curved machete, as if performing a ritual sacrifice.

The murder horrified quiet, complacent, prosperous Holland, a country that prides itself on being a bastion of tolerance, and sent shockwaves across Europe and around the world. Shortly thereafter, Ian Buruma returned to his native country to try to make sense of it all, and to see what larger meaning should and shouldn't be drawn from this story. The result is "Murder in Amsterdam", which is reviewed by John Waters on this week's Off the Shelf.

Programme 36: 23rd June 2007
This week on Off the Shelf the panel discuss Dark side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest by Gerard De Groot discussed by Leo Enright and Maryanne Valiulis. For a very brief moment during the 1960s, America was moonstruck. In "Dark Side of the Moon", Gerard De Groot reveals how NASA cashed in on the Americans' thirst for heroes in an age of discontent and became obsessed with putting men in space. The moon mission was sold as a race which America could not afford to lose. Landing on the moon, it was argued, would be good for the economy, for politics, and for the soul. It could even win the Cold War. The great tragedy is that so much effort and expense was devoted to a small step that did virtually nothing for mankind.

Programme 35: 16th June 2007
This week in 'Off the Shelf', two recent collections of short stories are reviewed by Julia Carlson and Niall MacMonagle: Every Move You Make by David Malouf (Chatto & Windus) and Sweet Land Stories by E.L. Doctorow (Abacus).

David Malouf's canvas is the vast Australian continent from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons behind the Great Divide in Far North Queensland, to bohemian Balmain and the Centre at Uluru, but always there are enticing glimpses of a world beyond, and the stories are tender, subtle, unsettlingly intimate.

In E.L. Doctorow's collection, you will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick house in rural Illinois ('A House on the Plains'), working things out with a baby-kidnapping couple in California ('Baby Wilson'), living on a religious-cult commune in Kansas ('Walter John Harmon'), sharing the heartrending cross-country journey of a young woman navigating her way through three bad marriages ('Jolene: A Life'), and witnessing an FBI special agent at a personal crossroads while he investigates a grave breach of White House Security ('Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden').

Programme 34: 9th June 2007
Mary Corcoran, Gemma Hussey and Brendan Halligan discuss Causes for Concern: Irish Politics, Culture and Society by Michael D. Higgins.

In this collection of writings and speeches made over the course of more than three decades, Michael D. offers his opinions on, among other subjects, the current situation in Iraq, the state of the education system, the culture of gombeenism and the colonisation of the cultural space by big business and the political establishment. He also sheds light on his background growing up in the west of Ireland, and the way this background has shaped his political outlook and continues to inform his view of the world.

Programme 33: 2nd June 2007
Irish Freedom: A History of Nationalism in Ireland by Richard English.

Two distinguished historians, John A. Murphy and Ronan Fanning, are in studio with Andy O'Mahony to discuss Irish Freedom: A History of Nationalism in Ireland by Richard English.

The book offers explanations of why Irish nationalists have believed and acted as they have, why their ideas and strategies have changed over time, and what effect Irish nationalism has had in shaping modern Ireland. It takes us from the Ulster Plantation to Home Rule, from the Famine of 1847 to the Hunger Strikes of the 1970s, from Parnell to Pearse, from Wolfe Tone to Gerry Adams, from the bitter struggle of the Civil War to the uneasy peace of the early twenty-first century.

Programme 32: 26th May 2007
Alliance: The Inside Story of how Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another by Jonathan Fenby.

Richard Aldous and James Downey join presenter Andy O'Mahony to discuss three very different men from three very different countries who saved the world from Fascism in the Second World War. As their armies fought on three continents, Franklin Roosevelt, Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill charted the shape of the post-war world in intensive and often fraught exchanges stretching over four years. This book tells the inside story of how they won the war and defined the peace, as their original hopes were replaced by growing East-West confrontation which would lead to the Cold War as the United States and the Soviet Union became superpowers and Britain grappled with decline.

Programme 31: 19th May 2007
Acting Irish in Hollywood

The first academic study of Irish film stars in Hollywood, "Acting Irish in Hollywood" contains ten essays on leading Irish stars including well-known actors Barry Fitzgerald and Maureen O'Hara. It also aims to remind readers of Ireland's forgotten film stars, particularly George Brent and Constance Smith.

Programme 30: 12th May 2007
Writing Lough Derg: From William Carleton to Seamus Heaney by Peggy O'Brien is the book on 'Off the Shelf' this week.

Discussing the book with Andy O'Mahony will be Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Brian Cosgrove, and Mark Patrick Hederman OSB.
Linked with the supernatural from pagan times, Lough Derg had by the early twentieth century become an icon of the fusion of the Catholic Church and the Irish nation. Surveying literary treatments of Lough Derg from William Carleton through Denis Devlin, Patrick Kavanagh, and ultimately Seamus Heaney, Peggy O'Brien addresses the role of spirituality in an increasingly cosmopolitan, post modern, post Catholic Ireland.

O'Brien's extended consideration of Heaney culminates in an insightful juxtaposition with Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet who also struggled with the conflation of Catholicism and patriotism.

Programme 29: 5th May 2007
The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer

Told in the voice of a narrator, who in time reveals himself as an assistant to the devil, this playful yet profound novel blends fact and fiction in an incomparable family tale; that of the Hitlers. Spanning three generations and a hundred years of history, the book brings to life their marriages, incestuous couplings, estrangements, afflictions, deaths and ultimately, the birth of young Adolf in 1889.

Programme 28: 28th April 2007
Rob Weatherill and Ross Skelton discuss Freud's Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones.

Written by the award-winning biographer Brenda Maddox, the book tells the story of a remarkable man, mercurial and quixotic. The son of a colliery clerk in South Wales, his insinuation into the inner circle of psychoanalysis is an improbable story. Likewise, the devastating, if dubious, sexual success he enjoyed with female patients caused intrigue among his contemporaries.
In 1938, Jones flew to Vienna to rescue Freud from the Nazi threat. With the media frenzy that greeted Freud's arrival in England, psychoanalysis hit the mainstream. Jones subsequently wrote the definitive, three-volume biography of his mentor.

Programme 27: 21st April 2007
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro discussed by Ita Daly.

Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather, James Laidlaw, sailed to the new world with his family in 1818. This is the story of him and his descendants, among them the author herself. They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned on, and fear was commonplace, at least for females. And woven into it are first-person stories that draw on material from Munro's own life... First love flowers under an apple tree while lust rears its head in a barn; a restless mother with ideas beyond her station declines painfully; a father farms fox fur and turkeys; a clever girl escapes to college and then into a hasty marriage.

Programme 26: 14th April 2007
Writing Lough Derg: From William Carleton to Séamus Heaney by Peggy O'Brien is the book on 'Off the Shelf' this week.

Programme 25: 7th April 2007
The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris by Alicia Drake is the book up for discussion on this week's Off the Shelf.

In 1954, Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld were two young talents from the provinces, both dreaming of Paris, glamour and glory. Saint Laurent was the charmed youth, the enfant terrible inheritor of Dior's couture crown. Lagerfeld was the freelance designer with a talent for ready-to-wear. The two cliques could not help but become rivals. But as the 70s turned to the 80s, heroin and Aids cast their shadow; fashion became an industry, money prevailed and the beautiful people discovered the danger of living their dreams.

Programme 24: 31st March 2007
Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda by Michael Burleigh

This week on Off the Shelf, a discussion on Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda by Michael Burleigh (HarperPress) with Eunan O'Halpin and Bill McSweeney.

"Sacred Causes" examines how religion has shaped 20th-century Europe from the Great War until the modern-day War on Terror. During the Second World War, the churches faced agonising dilemmas, notably how to respond to the Holocaust. Controversially, Burleigh uses new evidence to show that Pope Pius XII performed well. Burleigh examines the many 'secular' religions the twentieth century produced, analysing how successive totalitarian leaders fantasised and aped the hierarchy, rites and ritual of the churches in the desire to return to the day where ruler and deity were one. All the many bloody regimes and movements of the century are here, from Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain through to modern scourge of terrorism the current 'War on Terror'

Programme 23: 24th March 2007
Christianity and Creation; the Essence of the Christian Faith and its Future among Religions by James P. Mackey

This week Christianity and Creation; the Essence of the Christian Faith and its Future among Religions by James P. Mackey discussed by Gina Menzies, Mark Patrick Hederman OSB, and Dr. Eamon Conway. Finding the essence of Christianity in the lived creation faith of Jesus the Jew, Mackey shows what the Christian religion has lost or corrupted on the way, what corrections and advances need to be made in all the Christian churches, and what future the Christian faith can plot for itself in a world characterized by an increasing secular culture, by a growing interest in spirtualities without the trappings of religion, and by ever-closer encounters between all the religions of the human race.

Programme 22: 17th March 2007
Con Cremin: Ireland's Wartime Diplomat by Niall Keogh

Former Irish diplomats Noel Dorr and Seán Donlon, along with Prof. Ronan Fanning of UCD, have been reading 'Con Cremin: Ireland's Wartime Diplomat' by Niall Keogh (Mercier).

Relying on a range of personal papers and diplomatic material from Ireland and France, this biography describes Cremin's career, which included postings to all of the major Irish missions abroad: Paris and Vichy in the late 1930s, Berlin during the later years of the war, on to Lisbon before concluding his service back in headquarters in Dublin.

His diplomatic life was fascinating largely because of the timing and relevance of his postings. His career gives many insights into the role of the Irish state in a time of upheaval in Europe.

Programme 21: 10th March 2007
Lies in a Mirror: An Essay on Evil and Deceit by Peter Charleton

For literature fans RTÉ Radio 1's Off the Shelf is the ultimate book programme, presented by Andy O'Mahony who is joined in studio by guests to discuss a different book each week.

This week Finbar McAuley, Professor of Criminal Law at UCD, Rob Weatherill, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and Rev. Patrick Hannon, a theologian and barrister, discuss 'Lies in a Mirror: An Essay on Evil and Deceit' by Peter Charleton.

Drawing on the author's own experience in the criminal courts, and using a fascinating series of historical and psychological examples, this book argues that deceit is the engine of evil. Lying myths are the driving force behind the most extreme forms of violence. The author sees this as a timeless pattern, from the
persecution of the Christians in the second century to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Programme 20: 3rd March 2007
Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal

This week on Off the Shelf, Ita Daly and John Boland discuss Gore Vidal's memoir Point to Point Navigation.

From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theatre, politics, and international society, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and on a number of occasions lost). Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Greta Garbo, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the book's most moving pages are devoted to the illness and death of his partner of five decades, Howard Austen, and indeed the book is, among other things, a meditation on mortality written in the spirit of Montaigne.

Programme 19: 17th February 2007
This week two books, Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan and Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey

Discussed by Julia Carlson and Maurice Devlin.

Programme 18: 10th February 2007
Ireland since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict by Henry Patterson

Historians John A. Murphy and Ronan Fanning join Andy O'Mahony to discuss Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict by Henry Patterson.

"Ireland Since 1939" is a history of Ireland, north and south of the border, since the outbreak of the Second World War. Synthesizing primary and secondary sources, Patterson shows how interdependent those histories and the mirroring ideologies that have fuelled them have been.

Programme 17: 3rd February 2007
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

The Looming Tower is the first book to tell the full story of Al Qaeda from its roots up to 9/11. Drawing on interviews and first-hand sources, it investigates the extraordinary group of ideologues behind this organisation - and those who tried to stop them. Lawrence Wright takes us into training camps, mountain hideouts and top secret meetings to explore how it all fed into the planning and execution of 9/11 - and reveals the real, complex origins of Al Qaeda's hatred of the West.

Programme 16: 27th January 2007
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson

The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalizing, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people. Instead, the 20th century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalized in history with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. What went wrong? Niall Ferguson's "The War of the World" attempts to find answers to this question, and is discussed on this week's Off the Shelf by Finola Kennedy, Noel Dorr, and Rob Weatherill.

Programme 15: 20th January 2007
This week Maurice Devlin and Julia Carlson will be discussing two recent short-story collections: The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories by Valerie Martin and Tales From Rainwater Pond by Billy Roche.

Billy Roche is already an acclaimed playwright and novelist, but Tales From Rainwater Pond is his first collection of short stories. Set in his native Wexford town, the stories tell of love and loss, of redemption, loneliness and obsession

Valerie Martin is the author of two collections of short fiction and six novels, including the 2003 Orange Prize-winning Property. Her latest collection turns an unflinching eye upon artists - driven and blocked, desired and detested, infamous and sublime, as they struggle beneath the tyranny of art, to reconcile their audience with their muse.

Programme 14: 13th January 2007
LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Feargal Quinn, Laura Magahy and Niamh Brennan have been reading Leadership and Management in the 21st century, a volume edited by Cary L. Cooper which brings together the thoughts of leading figures from industry, academia, the public sector, professional bodies, and the media, to reflect on what the twenty-first century may mean for businesses and their leaders. In doing so they cover such topics as leadership, corporate culture, organizational structures, innovation, working life, and management education and the business school.

Programme 13: 6th January 2007
Unknown Soldiers: How Terrorism transformed the Modern World by Matthew Carr

Máirín de Burca, Ron Hill and Tom Clonan have been reading Unknown Soldiers: How Terrorism transformed the Modern World by Matthew Carr (Profile). Unknown Soldiers is a cultural history of terrorism, from the Russian Anarchists to Al Qaeda, examining the phenomenon throughout recent history, and showing how terrorism has influenced and has been portrayed by artists, writers and the media.

INTROSPECT 2006 - Listen to the show
On the eve of New Year, Andy O'Mahony chairs a discussion on the book, 'The Soul of Ireland'. Recognising that our economic fortunes have been transformed, do we need to take stock and reflect on our culture and sense of identity, and on the kind of society we would like and deserve to have?
RTÉ Radio 1, New Year's Eve, 6.05pm

Programme 12: 30th December 2006
The Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade by Howard Sounes

As 2007 draws to a close, there's a look back at a previous decade - the Seventies - with John Waters, Stephanie McBride and Robert Ballagh, who have been reading 'The Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade' by Howard Sounes.

When people think of culture in the 1970s they usually conjure up a confetti of kitsch, in which pet rocks vie for space with the Partridge Family to the tune of the Bay City Rollers. It was, so the received wisdom goes, the decade that taste forgot, a cultural wasteland compared to the decade that preceded it or those that have followed it. Not so, Howard Sounes argues: The 1970s may have had flares and big hair, but it also had Martin Scorsese, Lou Reed, David Hockney, Iris Murdoch, Jack Nicholson, David Bowie, John Updike, Diane Arbus, Monty Python, Richard Rogers -- and, of course, Snoopy.

Programme 11: 23rd December 2006
SHORT STORIES BY BERNARD MACLAVERTY & COLM TOIBIN

Bernard MacLaverty's latest collection of short stories "Matters of Life and Death" begins with the sudden, nauseating terror of a family caught up in an explosion of shocking sectarian violence and ends with the white-out of an Iowa blizzard and a different kind of fear: the fear of displacement, erasure, of losing your way - and yourself - very far from home.

In Colm Toibin's collection "Mothers and Sons", each story paints a portrait of individuals at different pivotal moments in their lives. Toibin shows how their relationship with either a mother or a son, or their relationship to their own role as mother or son, reveals something unique and important about them.

Ita Daly and Maurice Devlin discuss these two new collections with presenter Andy O'Mahony.

Programme 10: 16th December 2006
Britain's Power Elites - The Rebirth of the Ruling Class

Britain's Power Elites: The Rebirth of the Ruling Class by Hywel Williams is the book under discussion this evening. James Wickham, a sociologist and Gemma Hussey, former T.D. and Minister for Education are in studio with Andy O'Mahony to discuss a book which deals with the power structure in Britain, but provides food for thought about where power lies in Ireland.

In the book, Hywel Williams reveals how power has left the regions and the upholders of the constitution in Britain. The facade of power at Westminster has become a distraction from elite activity that happens elsewhere. The capital's money men have flourished in the modern era. They grasped the new opportunities that emerged and they have seen off or subverted any attempts to curtail their freedom. The City has killed its rivals and everyone has been too polite to mention it.

Programme 9: 9th December 2006
The Cambridge History of Irish Literature

Terry Dolan, Michael Cronin and Terence Brown have been reading the Cambridge History of Irish Literature, edited by Margaret Kelleher and Philip O'Leary.

This is the first comprehensive history of Irish literature in both its major languages. Spanning fifteen centuries of literary achievement, the two volumes range from the earliest medieval Latin texts to the late twentieth century. The contributors, drawn from a range of Irish, British and North American universities, are internationally renowned experts in their fields.

Programme 8: 2nd December 2006
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

Peadar Kirby, Mary Corcoran and Fr. Seán McDonagh have been reading Planet of Slums, by Mike Davis. The book charts the expected global urbanization explosion over the next thirty years and points out that outside China, most of the rest of the world's urban growth will be without industrialization or development. With a third of the global urban population living in Dickensian slums, at least half under the age of twenty, Mike Davis explores the threat of disease, of forced settlement on hazardous terrains, and of state violence, on huge populations. Mike Davis argues that this enormous population of marginalised labourers is not a frenzied beehive of ambitious entrepreneurs but an 'active' unemployed, who have no choice but to subsist by some means or starve.

Programme 7: 25th November 2006
Look me in the Eye: A Life in Television

The book on Off the Shelf this week is Look me in the Eye: A Life in Television by Jeremy Isaacs (Little Brown). Andy O'Mahony is joined in studio by three veteran television producers who have read the book: Lelia Doolan, Joe Mulholland and Muiris MacConghail.

Jeremy Isaacs has spent more than 45 years in television, and has witnessed, and in some cases instigated, the major changes which made it the cultural force that it is today. After working with Granada and Rediffusion, Isaacs joined the BBC in 1965, editing Panorama, before joining Thames Television, where he made The World At War. He was appointed chief executive of Channel 4 when it opened in 1979. There he engineered a deliberately eclectic mix of programmes and put television into the hands of small, entrepreneurial film-makers. After a period as General Director of the Royal Opera House, and then making some award-winning documentary series with Ted Turner, Isaacs is currently heading Artworld for Sky.

Programme 6: 18th November 2006
Julia Carlson and Maurice Devlin have been reading Everyman by Philip Roth (Cape).The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, and its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all. The fate of Roth's "Everyman" is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death during his childhood, through the crises of health that come close to killing him as a vigorous adult, and into his old age, when he is relentlessly stalked by his own physical woes. "Everyman" is a painful human story of the regret, loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be.

Programme 5: 11th November 2006
The book under discussion this week is "Don't Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890" by John Ramsden (Little, Brown).

On the panel are historians Michael Laffan and Eunan O'Halpin, along with James Downey, former London Editor of the Irish Times. The book looks at every aspect of Anglo-German relations for the last 100 years: from the two World Wars to how they have been seen by the tabloids as re-enacted in subsequent football matches.

And he asks 'What is the British problem with Germany?' As Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin once said 'I tries 'ard, but I 'ates 'em'.

Programme 4: 4th November 2006
Crystal Clear: the Selected Prose of John Jordan, edited by Hugh McFadden, is the book under discussion this week. Joining Andy O'Mahony will be the editor himself, along with David Norris and Ailbhe Smyth.

Writer, poet, academic, broadcaster and re-founder of the magazine "Poetry Ireland", Dublin-born John Jordan (1930-88) was a distinguished scholar - critic in the Dublin of the fifties and sixties. This gathering of his prose essays and reviews is taken from the columns of the "Irish Press", "Hibernia", "The Crane Bag" and "Irish University Review". They focus on Joyce, Kavanagh, O'Casey, Behan, Bowen, Gregory, Shaw and Wilde, as well as on Irish drama and Paul Valery.

Programme 3: 28th October 2006
Stephanie McBride and John Devitt have been reading The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks took over Hollywood by James Mottram (Faber).

A formidable new generation of American film-makers are currently in their prime: Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze, among them.

A conspicuous number of these talents first kick-started their careers in the workshops of Robert Redford's Sundance Institute in Utah, or made the big time after screening their work at the Sundance Film Festival. James Mottram traces the roots of this new generation to Steven Soderbergh's "Sex, Lies and Videotape" - a low-budget tour de force that was premiered at Sundance en route to conquering Cannes which persuaded some of the 'Sundance Kids' to first pick up a camera.

Programme 2: 21st October 2006
This week Julia Carlson and Maurice Devlin discuss "Terrorist"
by John Updike

Programme 1: 14th October 2006
Off the Shelf is back this evening with a programme about the book "Ireland", first published in the 1830s after Gustave de Beaumont travelled through Ireland to observe its people and society. In "Ireland", he chronicles the history of the Irish and offers up a national portrait on the eve of the Great Famine. Published to acclaim in France, "Ireland" remained in print there until 1914. In a devastating critique of British policy in Ireland, Beaumont questioned why a government with such enlightened institutions tolerated such oppression. He was scathing in his depiction of the ruinous state of Ireland, noting the desperation of the Catholics, the misery of repeated famines, the unfair landlord system, and the faults of the aristocracy.

Andy O'Mahony discusses this compelling book with Kevin Whelan and James H Murphy.