Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World [Hardcover]

Maurice Walsh is a gifted writer with a novelists eye for the illuminating detail of everyday lives in extremis&The great strength of Walshs book is its breadth of vision. His book challenges parochial tendencies in the revolutionary story.Maurice Walshs invigorating account of the revolution and its immediate aftermath starts after the Rising, and firmly locates the Irish crisis in the postwar Europe described by Thomas Masaryk as a laboratory atop a vast graveyard. Vivid and incisive, his approach highlights discontinuities and contradictions among the revolutionaries.Maurice Walshs book is the most vivid and dramatic account of this epoch to date: if you want to feel the full horror of Bloody Sunday in Dublin and the sacking of Balbriggan by the Black and Tans, this is the place to look.The great strength of this compelling book is that it manages to make large and abstract arguments while conveying a sense of the lived experience of the Irish revolution. With one hand, Maurice Walsh widens his lens, while simultaneously he applies a magnifying glass with the other. The result of this dexterity is an arresting set of Big Pictures interspersed with a sequence of vivid miniatures. Indeed, the particular originality of the work lies in the striking conjunction of images.An