- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Anchor Canada (Aug 1 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 038566043X
- ISBN-13: 978-0385660433
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13 x 2.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 290 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #164,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This coming-of-age memoir is not only about the author but Ireland itself. Ireland's state-run television—called Radio Telefis Éireann (RTE)—was introduced on the last day of 1961. Doyle (now a TV critic for a Toronto newspaper), weaves tales of Bat Masterson along with everyday life in Nenagh, County Tipperary, where priests, begrudgers and busybodies prevail in a country not much changed from when Frank McCourt escaped it more than a decade before. "Nenagh was full of religion," according to Doyle, and he successfully escaped a nation where priests and the fear of sex—not to mention poverty, immigration, revolution in the north and lack of birth control and divorce—reigned by tuning in such shows as Gunsmoke and Monty Python. Doyle does a marvelous of job of dissecting the cultures of each county by what kind of programming they provided. As the book ends, we see the walls of old Ireland collapsing as the Catholic Church loses its place of prominence and new laws on birth control and divorce are introduced into the country, just as Ireland's economic prominence is in its ascendancy. A marvelous read, with keen insights and laugh-out-loud moments, that explains how Ireland, with the help of the TV set, has evolved over the past 40 years. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Review
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
“Doyle traces in an idiosyncratic, but always convincing way, the effect that television had on liberating Ireland from the iron grip of the Catholic church. Once Donna Reed was happy, despite never saying the rosary or going to confession, the social landscape changed. Once civil rights and women's rights marched through the living rooms of Ireland the political landscape was forever altered. A Great Feast of Light is the perfect portrayal of the 'global village' and its consequences.”
– Catherine Gildiner, author of Closer to the Falls
“A liltingly written, passionately engaged piece of work that braids three distinct approaches into a tight, furious whole... Doyle's book has the great virtue of being both particular and personal in its details, and broad in its imaginative and nostalgic appeal.”
– Joan Barfoot, author of Luck
“For all its sharp insights into recent Irish history, A Great Feast of Light is as much post-McLuhan fable as Irish memoir, a gifted writer's story – funny, original, compelling – of his coming of age in one small outpost of the Global Village.”
– The Globe and Mail
"A delightful memoir about growing up in Ireland. It’s also a perceptive sociological sketch of how television exposed insular Irish culture to the glamour of the outside world. . . . As a social study or personal reflection, A Great Feast of Light is a provocative and highly entertaining read.”
—The Hamilton Spectator
"It is a delightful and original ramble; laconic, rueful and richly evocative of a time and place long gone and hardly lamented."
– The London Free Press
"When you're small and in a small town people think you're blank, hardly there at all. Doyle keeps the breathless reader close and whispers ample rare sightings as if to... birdwatchers....ghost hunters. The result is a whispering Ireland where enlightenment's a bird and insularity's a ghost and even a boy knows better than to disturb either. A great feast of enlightenment."
—Gord Downie
From the Hardcover edition.
“Doyle traces in an idiosyncratic, but always convincing way, the effect that television had on liberating Ireland from the iron grip of the Catholic church. Once Donna Reed was happy, despite never saying the rosary or going to confession, the social landscape changed. Once civil rights and women's rights marched through the living rooms of Ireland the political landscape was forever altered. A Great Feast of Light is the perfect portrayal of the 'global village' and its consequences.”
– Catherine Gildiner, author of Closer to the Falls
“A liltingly written, passionately engaged piece of work that braids three distinct approaches into a tight, furious whole... Doyle's book has the great virtue of being both particular and personal in its details, and broad in its imaginative and nostalgic appeal.”
– Joan Barfoot, author of Luck
“For all its sharp insights into recent Irish history, A Great Feast of Light is as much post-McLuhan fable as Irish memoir, a gifted writer's story – funny, original, compelling – of his coming of age in one small outpost of the Global Village.”
– The Globe and Mail
"A delightful memoir about growing up in Ireland. It’s also a perceptive sociological sketch of how television exposed insular Irish culture to the glamour of the outside world. . . . As a social study or personal reflection, A Great Feast of Light is a provocative and highly entertaining read.”
—The Hamilton Spectator
"It is a delightful and original ramble; laconic, rueful and richly evocative of a time and place long gone and hardly lamented."
– The London Free Press
"When you're small and in a small town people think you're blank, hardly there at all. Doyle keeps the breathless reader close and whispers ample rare sightings as if to... birdwatchers....ghost hunters. The result is a whispering Ireland where enlightenment's a bird and insularity's a ghost and even a boy knows better than to disturb either. A great feast of enlightenment."
—Gord Downie
From the Hardcover edition.
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4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great slice of Irish life, July 1 2007
By Hearth - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age (Paperback)
Coming from an Irish background, I'm always interested in what Irish life is like. This book starts out in the fifties and shows the dramatic effect of access to television on an Irish family. The outside world came to insular Ireland and nothing was ever the same. Excellent, well told. It doesn't pound on the metaphor, but shows how life did really change.
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