We Don't Know Ourselves

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARNATIONAL BESTSELLERThe Atlantic: 10 Best Books of 2022Best Books of the Year: Washington Post, New Yorker, Salon, Foreign Affairs, New Statesman, Chicago Public Library, Vroman's[L]ike reading a great tragicomic Irish novel. James Wood, The New YorkerMasterful . . . astonishing. Cullen Murphy, The Atlantic"e;A landmark history . . . Leavened by the brilliance of O'Toole's insights and wit. Claire Messud, HarpersWinner 2021 An Post Irish Book Award Nonfiction Book of the Year from the judges: The most remarkable Irish nonfiction book Ive read in the last 10 years; [A] book for the ages.A celebrated Irish writers magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world.Fintan OToole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish governmentin despair, because all the young people were leavingopened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Dont Know Ourselves, OToole, one of the Anglophone worlds most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary backwater to an almost totally open societyperhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history.Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, OToole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Irelands main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublins streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. OToole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In OTooles telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedys 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis.A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, OToole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of deliberate unknowing, which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Dont Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us.