Fintan O'Toole - We Don't Know Ourselves

Fintan O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government, in despair because all the young people were leaving, opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland has gone from a reactionary backwater to an almost totally open society.

A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O’Toole 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 Don’t 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.

Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for the Irish Times and a professor at Princeton University. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Guardian. The most recent of his many, celebrated books are Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks; Judging Shaw; Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain; and The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism.
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