Books on Zbigniew Brzezinski, unique medieval Irish chronicles and the ties between Ireland and Iceland
Edward Luce's expertly researched and highly readable biography of Zbigniew Brezinski is a comprehensive account of one of the most consequential American lives of the last century. Born into the Polish ascendancy, Brezinski was raised in Canada before climbing the groves of Ivy League universities. A precocious talent, his expertise on the Soviet Union brought him to the attention of the US government. Brzezinski would become the Democrat Party counterweight to
Henry Kissinger
, the eminence grise of Republican Party foreign policy for decades. The book deftly chronicles the intellectual tussles between these two emigres and their impact on the US and its place in the world. Brzezinski, who died a few months after Donald Trump became president in 2017, warned that the reality TV star's contempt for foreign policy conventions would ultimately backfire. It is likely that even he would be shocked by the extent of his prescience.
John Walsh
The Irish Annals: Their genesis, evolution and history by DP McCarthy (Four Courts Press, €31.50)
As an important source of history, the manuscripts of the Irish Annals flourished for about 12 centuries and collectively represent a significant place in culture. The Annals are the unique medieval chronicles maintained in Ireland from the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century up to the late 16th century. Twelve deeply researched chapters take the reader from the origins and terminology used through the variety of chronicles including those from Iona, Moville and Clonmacnoise, Armagh, Derry, Connacht and Fermanagh. The author states that a manuscript written at Clonmacnoise near the end of the 11th century represents the best example of the genre near the climax of its monastic phase, and in particular the fine writing and decoration on good quality vellum.
Paul Clements
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Ireland in Iceland, Gaelic Remnants in a Nordic Land by Manchán Magan
(illustrated by Aodh Ó Riagáin/ Oreganillo) (Mayo Book Press, €25)
Ireland in Iceland is the second in a series of books that explore similarities between Irish and foreign cultures. As is typical of both the book's author and publisher, it is a beautifully designed edition, elevated by the saibhreas of Oreganillo's artwork. Magan has developed somewhat of a cult following in recent years for his ability to make accessible the Irish language and culture in a manner that feels dílis dár n-oidhreacht. This edition, however, offers less intrigue. With studies revealing that at least half of the first settlers in Iceland were of Gaelic origin, Magan undertook this project expecting, as one might, to find resonances between the two cultures. However, his self-reported findings show these similarities are few and vague. The result understandably makes for underwhelming reading.
Brigid O'Dea
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Irish Times
12 hours ago
- Irish Times
Donald Trump's Washington ‘crime crackdown' has so far met with a sandwich thrown in resistance. Will it end there?
Residents of Georgetown, the redbrick, hushed, window-boxed confection of ideal living framed around its historic university campus and the deathless legacy of a young tousled-haired senator from Massachusetts , were surprised to see members of the National Guard patrolling their neighbourhood . But there they were, striding along M Street. What could be happening on the mean streets of Georgetown, they wondered? Civil unrest among the ubiquitous line of teenage customers waiting in line to get into Brandi Melville? A marathon debate over a reserved parking spot between two professors in the philosophy faculty? One of the unfair myths about Georgetown is that the 1970s community declined the city's plans to dig a Metro tunnel when the network was being extended in order to keep the neighbourhood just so. Many papers and articles have been written explaining that the truth was more complex: the hardness of the rock; an insufficient population to justify the need. Either way, Georgetown has no Metro line and therefore remains slightly apart not just from Washington, DC, but on dreamier days – when the petals are strewn on its redbrick streets and the taverns and restaurants, sun-kissed and blessed – from reality itself. It is a living, breathing dream machine. READ MORE On March 17th last year, the White House prepared for what turned out to be president Joe Biden's final come-all-ye for the Irish in the green room. It was a Saturday so the hot spots around Adams Morgan and Connecticut Avenue were busy with green-clad revellers for 'St Patty's Day'. But the local news reports carried a story that seemed shockingly local key. Seven people had been shot in a late night mass-shooting incident at a city centre apartment complex. Two were dead, five were wounded. The story was a footnote in the local networks and did not feature nationally. A protester holds a sign and follows members of the National Guard as they patrol Union Station in Washington DC. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/The New York Times What made the shooting stand out is that it occurred in the northwest of the city. Washingtonians are quite upfront about the demarcation lines within the city, with the wards of north and west essentially cocooned from the deprived neighbourhoods to the south and east of the city riven by shootings and drug-related crimes and civilian safety issues. By late 2023 stories of indiscriminate carjackings, occurring even in Georgetown, were worrying residents and the news networks alike. The gentrification of neighbourhoods such as Shaw, in the heart of downtown, and parts around the Capitol were juxtaposed with interviews of the incoming residents who reported accounts of late night gunfire and antisocial behaviour. None of the sales brochures had carried news of this. It left long-term Washingtonians fearing a return to the worst years of the early 1990s: the city was the murder capital, as well as the official capital of the US in 1991, with 482 murders. As national attention became riveted to the presidential election last year, Donald Trump issued many dark proclamations about the city and promised to clear it up when he returned. Meanwhile, the city's administrative and metropolitan police force began to get to grips with the issue. The crime statistics fell dramatically. Some 273 people were killed in 2023; by the end of 2024, that had fallen to 187 homicides. But as Megan McArdle pointed out in her Washington Post column, that still represents about 27 people for every 100,000 residents. It's an alarmingly high figure compared with other big east coast cities – in Boston the ratio is 3.7 per 100,000 residents and in New York, another city president Trump likes to depict as out of control, it is 4.7. Members of the National Guard pose for a selfie outside Union Station in Washington, DC. Photograph: Andrew Leyden/Getty The declaration of a citywide emergency by Trump this week, and the arrival of uniformed National Guard and FBI agents and an assortment of other law-enforcement agents, has provoked a strange response. Street protests by residents have been vocal but limited. The image of a lone white man in summer wear repeatedly yelling 'fascist' at uniformed patrolmen before hurling his Subway sandwich at the guardsman and then sprinting away into the night spoke volumes about the pure weirdness of this moment. The uniformed figure was, of course, doing his job, as he had been ordered to do. Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, took to X to gravely confirm that the protester had been charged with a felony, provoking both disgust and mirth. For what? Illegal use of a Spicy Italian? In a final twist, it emerged that the protester was an employee of the Department of Justice. On Wednesday night the first big push by the newly bolstered Washington law enforcement troops called into the city by Trump, there were 45 criminal arrests for assault, illegal drugs and narcotics, including three possessions of illegal firearms. Many people will welcome the removal of these threats from the streets – even if the overall figure seems low for a city under a state of civil emergency. The worry is that by day 25, Washingtonians could find themselves apprehended for flicking a cigarette butt into the gutter. A jogger who said 'thank you!' as he passed members of the National Guard outside Union Station in Washington, DC. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/The New York Times The broader questions – as to whether this is simply a 30-day distraction, or whether Trump will make good on his intention to call for an extension of the thirty-day limit, or whether this is the first intimation of a hitherto unimaginable authoritarian police era – drift through the hectic days. As ever with Trump, it is impossible to predict. But if it is the start of a plan to draft in federal enforcement to other big cities across the United States, then a sandwich hurled in frustration will be the least of it.
Irish Times
12 hours ago
- Irish Times
Zohran Mamdani has turned the politics of richest city in US on its head
In June Donald Trump , having manufactured a crisis over alleged obstruction in California of round-ups by his immigration police (ICE), flexed his authoritarian muscles, federalising the state national guard and deploying marines to back them up. Critics warned of the militarisation of the repression of dissent. This week the LA dress rehearsal was followed up – federal troops sent in to Washington, DC on the spurious pretext that it is awash with violent crime. In fact violent crime is at a 30-year low. And the president, determined to warn Democratic cities that he will not be defied and has the power effectively to take them over, threatened similar treatment to three other Democratic strongholds – Chicago, Baltimore and Oakland. He spoke to his real agenda: 'If a communist gets elected,' he said, 'we have tremendous power … to run places when we have to'. As The New York Times points out , the contrast between Trump's enthusiastic deployment of force against a mythical crime wave, and his refusal to intervene against mobs storming Congress speaks volumes. READ MORE A communist in America? Some chance. Except that, horror of horrors for Trump and the city's billionaire class, there is a very real chance that in November the New York mayoralty election will see a charismatic 33-year-old state assemblyman, self-confessed 'socialist' Zohran Mamdani, top the poll. A 'communist', complains Trump, who has spoken of depriving him of his citizenship and of jailing him for interfering with immigrant arrests. The administration is also suing the city for its refusal to co-operate with ICE. [ This man could be just what the American left needs Opens in new window ] Mamdani, born in Uganda to ethnic Indian parents, became a US citizen in 2018 and has attracted widespread controversy over his vocal support for Palestinian rights. He has brought a new dynamism to the left, stunning the political establishment with a sweeping victory, 'the biggest political upset in the city's history', in the city's Democratic primary in June . He took 56 per cent of the vote, 12 per cent more than next-placed, party leadership favourite, discredited former governor Andrew Cuomo. Controversy over Mamdani's immigration status follows a chorus of Islamophobic attacks on his Muslim faith, not to mention his unapologetic membership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organisational backbone of his campaign. Remarkably, however, polls show him galvanising significant Jewish support. Young people have flocked to him. The DSA traces its dramatic growth to the mid-2010s in the wake of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders' run for president and Trump's 2016 presidential victory. It now boasts some 80,000 members, 10,000 of them in New York, the core of the 60,000 well-drilled door-to-door canvassers who mobilised in the primary. Mamdani's success will offer it a huge national platform, reigniting a rich but largely eclipsed socialist tradition in American politics. Until recently 'socialist' remained largely a term of political insult. Now, according to a recent poll by the conservative Cato Institute, more Democrats have positive views of socialism (67 per cent) than capitalism (50 per cent), while among Americans under 30, 62 per cent feel favourable towards socialism. The lacklustre, traditional Democratic leadership, unable to capitalise on Trump's return or reverse his capture of significant parts of its working-class base, or to break with post-911 Islamophobia, is openly hostile to the upstart candidate. But the DSA and Mamdani have turned the politics of the country's richest city, with its vastly unequal living conditions, on its head. [ Why Donald Trump is only beginning his pursuit of the 'enemy within' Opens in new window ] Billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg, now an anti-Mamdani megadonor, boasted of gentrifying the city, transforming once grimy and rundown New York into what he called 'a luxury product'. But its cash-strapped residents have turned, attracted by the DSA's radical campaign focused on New York's affordability crisis – its programme: a rent freeze, free child care and free buses, a doubling of the minimum wage, 200,000 new units of affordable housing, and expanded public services, paid for in large part by higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. The crisis created by mass deportation has also prompted Mamdani to adopt a more militant anti-ICE posture than that of almost any other US politician, enabling the party to dig deep into the city's huge ethnic populations, most notably the Hispanics. And without becoming drawn into the divisive identity politics that have so long riven New York. The political climate, The Nation columnist Spencer Ackerman writes, has been transformed by 'the detentions and renditions of restaurant cooks, delivery drivers, day labourers, and other members of New York's working class. Mamdani, without necessarily meaning to, has illuminated the way that the tools of the war on terror are the tools of class war.' [ These five factors are how Zohran Mamdani took New York by storm Opens in new window ] The campaign is on and fierce, and all rather old-fashioned. When Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren was reproached for supporting Mamdani's plans to tax the rich she retorted simply: 'Oh dear, are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?' Touché. Roll on November.
Sunday World
21 hours ago
- Sunday World
Jim McDowell: Let's pray Trump's Alaska summit doesn't become a cold war carve up
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet in Alaska. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters. Remember that quote when all the dust has settled — and, hopefully, not the nuclear ash — around the Trump/Putin head-to-head on Friday. However, those words were not uttered by a US delegate to the Alaska summit. In an uncanny twist, they were voiced 80 years ago at another US/Russia rumpus over land... with Britain as the tripartite participant. That took place in Crimea. Remember Crimea? That was the first part of Ukraine Putin annexed before trying to invade the rest of President Volodymyr Zelensky's brave but battered and embattled country. But it was in Crimea, in the Black Sea port of Yalta eight decades ago at the end of the Second World War, that a summit not dissimilar to that in Alaska took place. And what was at stake was not just the survival of one small sovereign state which for over three years has stood toe-to-toe with the might of the Red Army. But the future of Europe. And a Cold War carve-up which was to last for the next 34 years, until the fall of the USSR in 1991, the historical symbol of which was the fall of the Berlin Wall. At that Yalta conference were US President Franklin D Roosevelt, Russian Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill — dubbed 'The Big Three' in the press at the time. And in another uncanny twist, another leader who thought he should be there, the Free French forces leader and then provisional President of France, Charles de Gaulle, took it as a slight that he was not invited. Just like President Zelensky on Friday. And there are more similarities. President Donald Trump greets Russia's President Vladimir Putin (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson) Trump, who with his vice-president puppet JD Vance bullied and berated Zelensky at the White House, didn't want him there: because he had already ill-disguised his dislike of the Ukrainian leader. De Gaulle believed Roosevelt harboured a long-standing personal antagonism towards him. And Stalin and the Russians also point-blank objected to de Gaulle being a full participant. Just as Putin did to Zelensky this time around. So a direct European input was denied in Yalta back then. Even though it was Europe, and Germany in particular, which was to be split East and West. Now the European Union and the UK, with PM Keir Starmer and his counterparts limited to phone diplomacy, are left sidelined again. Trump may have promised that he would take their opinions and concerns into consideration. But when was Trump ever concerned about anything, or anybody, other than himself? Ditto Putin. History dictates that Stalin tried to strong-arm the Yanks and Brits into getting what he wanted at Yalta. And he did. It remains to be seen, in retrospect, whether Putin, whose hero is said to be Stalin, managed to do the same in Anchorage: or will succeed at subsequent summits, if they transpire. Meantime, that quote at the top remains as relevant today as it did 80 years ago. The observation was made by James F Byrne, a senior US delegate at Yalta who was later to become the White House Secretary of State. Only this time, it is 'not a question of what Trump would let the Russians do, but what the US can get Putin to do'. It is too soon to make a call on that so soon after Friday. But perhaps it is not too soon to hope that both parties adhere to an old Russian proverb. It is: 'You have two ears, one mouth — listen twice as much as you speak'. As the dust settles on this summit, we can only hope that both so-called world leaders did just that: not just for the future of Ukraine, but for the future of the world.
