ANGUS REID urges us to understand the persecution of Jason Arday from a political and historical perspective, and to see the victim in human terms
Thin Places
Solace for troubled soul in Ireland’s natural world
THE INSPIRER: poet Paul Muldoon
[Alejandro Arras/Creative Commons]
Re-releases of the classics Gypsy Rhumba and Buena Vista Social Club, and a stunning album by Palestinian artist Faris Ishaq
Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
JAMIE BRITTON invites readers to visit 3,500 locals as part of a marathon artistic pub crawl
JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
KERRI NI DOCHARTAIGH’S Thin Places comes in on a tidal wave of nature books. Alarm at the speed of destruction of the natural world has set many writers to work and many publishers to spot a market.
Described as “a mixture of memoir, history and nature writing,” Ni Dochartaigh in this, her first book, turns to wild places and animals as a form of psychic escape.
It is the traumatic legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles that creates the constantly unsettled fugitive, finding balm in the wild swimming she loves, in rivers, lakes and seas flowing through what she calls “thin places.”
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