3 comments about Let's Go Ireland 12th Edition (Let's Go Ireland).

1. it is useful as a travel guide as much for giving you the lay of the land and strategies for planning your own travel through maps and descriptions as for specific recommendations, some of which are spot on and some of which are not. one really helpful feature (in 2004 edition, anyway, and I think still included) that I've not found in other guidebooks is the material on bus and rail journey times and connections for most towns. as with any guidebook it's only a sketch of what you'll find when in country but the practical information is good, and a needed addition to the more limited view of Frommer's/Fodor's and the like which assume you'll have a car and a good size budget.



2. In preparation for a 2 week trip to Ireland I purchased nearly every travel book I found, but while traveling, this was the one I used most. It seemed to fit my needs best as a budget traveler and had a lot of useful information on places to go and places to stay (i used it together with the Hostels Ireland book to compare reviews of hostels to make sure I was finding the best places possible).
   
   The only problem I seemed to have with it was the organization and also the lack of visuals in the book, it's just packed with so much information and so many city profiles that it could become overwhelming at times trying to figure out where to go.
   My advice would be using perhaps the Eyewitness Guide to help you plan for the trip (where to go, what to see) then find the places in this book and tag or dogear the sections somehow so you can find it later.
   So, great book to open up if you're in the city, standing on a street corner trying to figure out what to do and where to go, not so good if you're sitting at home in your kitchen mapping out your travel itinerary.
   
   I will probably stick with the Lets Go series for any future trips I take abroad.



3. I spent a month in Ireland this winter, and this book was the best tool for planning the perfect trip!

No comments about The Travels of Ibn Battuta: A. D. 1325-1354, Vol. 4 (Hakluyt Society, Second Series, 178).

2 comments about AAA Spiral Rome, 4th Edition (Aaa Spiral Guides Travel With Someone You Trust).

1. Great photos and book design, laid out to give the important information without overload, easy enough to carry with you in the street. Good breakdown of the areas within the city and the major sights. Would be an excellent book to look at if you are thinking of going to Rome to get a feel for the city. The maps are very good, the walking itineraries are very good; shopping, eating and entertainment is reviewed at the back of each city section. Only weak point is that only 14 hotels are reviewed, but those 14 are enough of a variety to get you a nice place. Well worth buying if you are heading over there.



2. This is the only guide you you need to Rome. It is complete, well organized, easy to use and unbiased. The guide contains enough information yet is still light enough to carry around.

No comments about The Kerry Way (Map).

5 comments about The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit.

1. The Red-Haired Girl From The Bog: The Landscape Of Celtic Myth And Spirit by Celtic history expert Patricia Monaghan is a spiritual voyage through the countryside of Ireland, exploring the intermeshing aspects of folklore, goddess worship, Celtic ceremony, and Christian faith. A thoughtful and deeply reverent viewpoint of a land steeped in tradition and lore, The Red-Haired Girl From The Bog is especially recommended for Celtic Mythology and Irish History reference collections and reading lists.



2. Ms Monaghan is not only an author, but also a poet and utilizes that skill within this book. While I wished to turn page to find what she might describe next; I, also, wished each page unending. Almost as if I felt I might loose the descriptions I'd just read if I moved forward.

   Rarely does a book touch me so.

   Could be I'm Irish? That helped I'm sure to entice me with stories and details, but the messages within the book were priceless to me.

   Her vivid story telling of Ireland, Celtic myths, Catholic practices and a rather mindful blending of the Pagan/Catholic or Protestant viewpoints in Ireland were incredible. How delightful to read about various customs and practices being combined so utterly!

   The descriptions of rituals..even small and discreet and of sacred caves, etc would give anyone a valuable viewpoint on Celtic folk lore.Diverse in delivery, Ms Monaghan can describe something as small as a puddle with such essence and clarity that you feel you've stepped in one right along beside her!

   She even manages to tackle the subject of fairies in such a way that is imaginative, steeped in lore, fantastic while also being modern, comprehensive and understandable. For the first time - ever - I read about fairies and didn't raise an eyebrow thinking the author must be sipping mugwort tincture.

   It's a down-to-earth-style bejeweled with imagery and poetry to enrich the spirit and feed the soul. Her friends and new folks she meets in her travels are witty and fun, enticing and intelligent.

   So if Celtic lore in Ireland, a blending of Pagan/Catholic/Protestant ideals and unforgettable mental pictures are to your liking...read
   The Red-Haired Girl From The Bog.

   Allow yourself the pure luxury of settling deep within the imagery and wisdom of this book. The lessons therein are subtle but exquisite indeed!

   Enjoy...




3. This is a book for fans of Ireland, the Goddess, Pagans, Christians, and mythology. I highly recommend it.

   A US author of Irish descent, Patricia tells of visits to Ireland over the years. She writes about searching for locations from Irish myth, such as entering faeryland and visiting the source of the Shannon looking for the salmon of wisdom. She also describes visiting different sacred sites at auspicious times, such as: lighting the Beltaine fires at Uisneach, the Mountains of the Cailleach and the Paps of Anu on different Lughnasadhs, Morrigan's cave on Samhain, Newgrange for winter solstice, and County Kildare for Imbolc.

   She explores Irish culture and politics, always coming back the the land and the people. Her description of re-lighting the Sacred Flame of Brigit at Kildare gives me chills every time I read it. Patricia says this book came out of requests from friends for travel recommendations in Ireland. It has certainly made me want to take the trip even more.




4. Some books have a life of their own and cannot be ignored. Long after you finished reading the last page, something about the book will return to you; an image or perhaps a phrase; possibly an entire sequence will be recalled in solitude. Words, like music, have a resonance that lasts long after the initial encounter. Such a book is Patricia Monaghan's The Red Haired Girl from the Bog.
   As a travel memoir, it is splendid; as a history book it is marvelous. But on a deeper level it is a magnificent essay, at once lyrical and moving. This book has resonance and because of its quality I know I will return to it again. Celtic myths, fairy woman, mystical places that speak to visitors, fog-shrouded landscapes that are so much more than they appear, sunlit fields and the voices of poets calling from the past. Monaghan's journey is captivating, compelling, and like all good stories, just a shade frightening. Exploring the Celtic myths and legends, interspersed with narratives about her many trips to Ireland, I found myself unable to set the book aside. Her book has that rare quality of taking the reader along for the trip, an accomplishment that only the best writers can manage. This book is subtitled "The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit" and I cannot think of a better, concise description of what you will find in its 295 magical pages. A toast then, to Patricia Monaghan, and may the Muse never leave her side.



5. Believe me, I approached this book with plenty of misgivings, given the title and the promotional hints. I do not know how much is savvy marketing--the more academic side of Monaghan's here put forth, as opposed to her being the author of "Wild Women," or the one subtitled "myth, marigolds, and mulches". Her eponymous web domain seems to have faded, but looking for information about her as I was reading this, she is noted as a leading popularizer of the Goddess and the reconstructed rituals that rejoin (as in the root of "re-ligion") people to nature. This insistence likewise permeates this book.
   
   It's carefully written. I usually "heard" her voice on the page, and as she notes in an aside, I assume that much of what she shares was freshly conveyed in a daily notebook on her travels and through her studies, and then expanded and mulled over much further before coming to print here. I admire Monaghan's determination to excavate using etymology. With a solid grounding in Irish as well as a rare combination of scientific training, her ecologically aware, if persistently soft-focused, depictions of the intermingling of the spiritual, the eccelesiastical, the historical, and the anecdotal make for quite an ambitious product belying the quick title-and-cover glance that casual prospects might give to this if in a New Age bookstore's "Celtic & Druidery" section. More power to her and her readers--they'll pick up more learning and not only lore than they may have bargained for. But you have to put up with, or become enchanted by, visions of she and her pals declaiming Yeats to the wind.
   
   She eschews footnotes but acknowledges any idea or source not her own, and an annotated booklist and source locator appends the book. (Errata: Lughnasa appears also as Lehynasa on p. 273; Kevin Danaher's book was not printed by Cork's Mercier Press in 1922 but 1972--otherwise I found no glaring errors or typos, impressively.) Honestly, New Age is not the first shelf I turn to when seeking books of Irish interest, but you need to be as eclectic and alert as is Monaghan when searching for elusive traces backwards into the "symbiosis" that she posits exists between Christianity and paganism in Ireland, over more than 1500 years.
   
   Other reviews have been more impressionistic, but let me give you a quick view of what in Irish is called "dindsenchas," as Frank MacEowen in his blurb calls "place-bonding stories," that tie toponymy to theology, ecology, and psychology in Monaghan's circuit sun-wise around the island. Beginning in the West, at Gort in Co Clare, she ties her Burren travels to the Hag, or "cailleach." Then she goes to Connemara for the "red-haired girl" and fairies--who are not Disneyfied delightful sprites. Up to Sligo, Mayo, Roscommon on the trail of Medb (Maeve) and the Morrigan, amidst Cruachan, Knocknarea, and holy wells. Then northerly for Emain Macha and Newgrange, with her own theories about a feminized Sun and the Irish ritual landscape thoughtfully told.
   
   A chapter inevitably a bit apart relates her own struggle with the North, and her self-awareness of being seen as the Other. It's clumsier and more self-consciously told, but more direct and reality-based. She confronts her own resentments of those she perceives as eying her differently. It's a bold departure from the rest of the book, and she does not shy away from reality. She cannot offer any new insights, and she probably knows this, but her encounter with her darker side balances her cheerful nature throughout the rest of her travelogue.
   
   I think her musings here about rapacious and/or romantic Viking ancestors accounting for her blue eyes went a bit overboard, and I don't doubt that Monaghan might agree and/or battle me into giving in to her determination to include her reveries--she's that kind of fair-minded investigator--but at least she does not back down from the strength or the fancy of her convictions. This is the model she admires and seeks to project into the Irish past as well as to gain sustenance from the faint but stubbornly grooved and cyclical tracks of its past power for our present. I did wonder at times why [feeling as I read a bit left out; compare neo-paganism, itself about 70% female practitioners] so few men compared to so many women sought to resurrect and rekindle its meanings and symbols, but the feminine-dominated powers, as she argues, gain the prominence even in the old tales and placenames more than males. As in Ireland-Eriu (the latter meaning "fertile field," a rare point she does not explicitly define here for herself.
   
   Monaghan tends to follow her instinct wherever it leads. She does not avoid the scholarly, but never lets it crush her soul. She has found a much more gentle and inspirational (in the root sense) sacralized landscape than I have encountered in Ireland. She has the advantage that many Irish Americans do not of direct connections and still-connected cousins due to more recent immigration in her family. This allows her more of a base from which to leap out across what she views ahead of her, intellectually, spiritually, and physically, This is a bold attempt to confront what always stoked my own thoughts: how far beneath today's Irish psyche and habits and mentality do you have to scratch before the pagan emerges?
   
   Helped by her ability to navigate pop culture, dictionaries, her own widespread support network of family and friends, and her inbred wanderlust from her being raised in Alaska, she brings her pagan and her Christian sides together most evidently in the visit to the unprepossessing exterior of the relit pagan fire for Brigit in Kildare. This joins the two realms in which she and so many Irish, according to her study, wander. Then, down to the sacralized cow, Tara, and the central Uisneach hill for fire ceremonies and Bealtaine. The scholarship dragged a bit more than elsewhere, but coupled with a moving meditation on the death of her friend Barbara, this makes for an honest encounter again with mortality. She points out that it's not the inevitability of death we fear, but its timing.
   
   Finally, she rounds out the tour in Kerry. She did not to connect Mis with Austin Clarke's 1970 poem "The Healing of Mis," or cite Emmet Larkin's 1970s model of the devotional revolution of the later 19c that transformed Ireland into the 20c stereotype of a priest-ridden backwater by extirpating many remnants of its folk beliefs, but her thoughts on the pagan sexuality nearly extinguished by a post-Famine Church make for convincing speculation. Danu's "paps" and how its worshippers erected atop her nipples as stone cairns above a gentle-breasted hilled landscape make for a perspective that, as she asserts, only a woman as herself noticed after so many male-dominated studies never had--or at least demurred from recording! In the wrap-up chapter, she and a friend go in search of first-hand folkloric recovery of their own sacred place, Garravogue near the Cavan border. They circle back and extend the circle into a spiral, fittingly, as they revolve around Ireland's own places made holy.
   
   Now, Monaghan has commonsense, more than some who have written about her book credit her with in my judgment as this Connacht-blooded Irish comments to/of another, her family from a point about equidistant from my two family origins only a few miles. By the way, her comments about the inevitable assurance from the locals of "only a mile more" and "sure you can't miss it" ring true for any stranger in search of rural landmarks, ruins, or simply the right road. She remarks on the county-town-parish-townland (she calls the last "farm") narrowing that Irish engage each other with when first nosing about the other's bonafides correctly, as I am of her now. This type of sensible observation, I hazard, makes her more observant and less beguiled by what she ponders in the more ethereal and filtered views she frames--and to be fair she mentions the rain and mud too when they often appear. I learned a lot from her, found that she often stayed one step ahead of me on her associations with the literary and historical and mythic resonances from what she traversed to keep me nimble, and that she wrote sensitively (if a bit too purple-prosed in parts, although these were helpfully often italicized) about her own heartfelt recoveries with the tangible traces of ideas and events long thought intangible.
   
   Skeptics, rationalists, and unbelievers would hate this book, but I prefer, as she does, to think that few actually deny all hope of some presence outlasting our own. This book, challenging in many parts and not all that wince-making in others (these sections are relatively few to her credit), will teach any seeker a lot about facts as well as fable. Monaghan digs into the former to find the latter, and vice versa.
   
   P.S. A book only published in Ireland, the similarly unfortunately titled "Emerald Spirit," (Cork: Mercier Press, 2003) by another American, David P Stang, makes a wonderful counterpart. John Moriarty's mythopoeic and densely argued work may be too recondite for many, but also may please readers of Monaghan; Clare seanachie Eddie Lenihan's penetrating look into faerie lore and fact, "Meeting with the Other Side," also is highly recommended if you want more about the play and peril between our realm and that elusive presence still said to swirl about the Irish countryside. Mapped well recently also by Cary Meehan in her "Traveller's Guide to Sacred Ireland."

No comments about Galway (Irish Discovery Map).

2 comments about U2 Rattle & Hum P.

1. "U2 : Rattle and Hum : The Official Book of the U2 Movie : A Journey into the Heartland of Two Americas" is something that every U2 collector should have on the shelf and a book that U2 fans and music aficionados in general will enjoy. The book chronicles the making of "Rattle and Hum" from the whys of making the film to the live finale at Sun Devil Stadium.
   
   The book takes you behind the scenes of shooting the film, telling of the challenges of making a film unlike any other previous release. It also introduces you to the principle players, both in front of and behind the camera. It discusses the band's influences and gives the stories behind various scenes.
   
   For people who could care less about the making of "Rattle and Hum" and just want to ogle the band, this book will give you plenty to drool over. There are quite a few photos from the shoots with Anton Corbijn, as well as live shots of U2, some which have been distributed widely on the internet, some which you will see for the first time in the book. All of the photos are very beautiful and make this book a great candidate for the coffee table (which is where one of my two copies is)...It's a musical journey." Indeed!



2. This is an excellent coffee table book full of pictures, pictures and oh yeah...more pictures. That's just fine I suppose-but one reviewer made the comment that it's a "musical journey" thus prompting me to buy the book. However, I didn't find it to be that exactly. Its a cheap, thin paperback photo album with small text paragraphs. For it to be "a musical journey", I would want it to have more text and more insight. To me that makes it more personal. I can watch Rattle and Hum on video and get a bigger buzz than thumbing through this coffee table book. Buyer beware. Buy the DVD of Rattle and Hum instead if you actually want to take a musical journey.

No comments about The Little Green Book of Blarney (Little Black Books) (Little Black Books (Peter Pauper Paperback)).

1 comments about Take the Kids Ireland, 2nd (Take the Kids - Cadogan).

1. Would like to have seen more blurbs on the side bars about what to pack and more stories, legends and history to tell the kids. There were some, but needs to be more. Also, would like to see a more eye appealing layout that perhaps kids would be able to follow along w/ while in ireland.

No comments about Wolfgang Borchert's Germany.