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Description: WINNER OF THE 2005 CHRISTOPHER EWART-BIGGS MEMORIAL AWARD 'Rebellions is an autobiography, an astonishingly clear-sighted and lucid account of a tragic and disputed episode in Irish history and a polemic. The book's importance, originality and real value arise from the way the personal, the political and the scholarly are each offered as passionate witness and not separated. The rebellion of 1798 in Wexford and its two hundredth anniversary have found a brilliant and fearless chronicler. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the arguments about how the past cut deeply into the way we live in Ireland now.'- Colm Tóibín A radical blend of history, historiography and memoir, Rebellions is a brilliant exploration of the shadowlands where the historical and the personal converge. Tom Dunne relates his upbringing in a strongly Catholic and republican family, and his years as a Christian Brother - examining how family and community shape the transmission of politics, subjecting complex historical events to the 'tyranny of the living'. From this starting point, Dunne takes his reader on a mesmerizing journey through the ‘cunning passages' of history, bringing an exacting scrutiny to bear on the bicentennial commemorations of the 1798 rebellion. These, he argues, failed to properly educate a community about the harrowing truths of its own past - with leading historians complicit in a sanitized and politically correct version of what were actually profoundly brutal and divisive events. Confronting this amnesia and denial head-on, Dunne focuses on a single bloody day, 5 June 1798, which saw a crushing defeat for the United Irishmen in the battle of New Ross and the massacre by rebels of 150 non-combatant Protestant men, women and children in a barn at Scullabogue. Here Dunne here fuses the personal - a well-remembered ancestor of his died heroically at New Ross - with the professional, tracing historical accounts of this day across two centuries reassembling the 'shards of memory' into a subversive exposition of how ideology distorts memory. Tom Dunne lectures in history at the National University of Ireland, Cork. He is author of Theobald Wolfe Tone: Colonial Outsider among other myriad papers and publications. He is also editor of The Irish Review. Less than 5 copies remaining of this First Edition paperback; buy now to avoid disappointment.
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