Previous Day
Why 'true crime' is a hard job to pull off
'THE BANK JOB' is the latest in a long line of films about a
real crime, but don't expect its version of the Baker Street
robbery to be too accurate - if gangster movies just stuck to the
plain facts, not many would be made, writes
Duncan Campbell . p
Sounds like teen spirit
SINGER-SONGWRITERS come in all shapes and sizes, all hues and tones. Sometimes, they are all mouth and no trousers and sometimes, they say something in a song that means so much to anyone with half a brain that they are worth, if not treasuring, then certainly developing a relationship with, writes Tony Clayton-Lea . p
Arts
The new cultural snobbery that sent Dustin to Eurovision
CULTURE SHOCK: DUSTIN'S VICTORY is a narrow-minded, two-fingered salute to the people who enjoy Eurovision, writes Fintan O'Toole . pTurning the pages of history
HISTORY, IT SEEMS, is a bestseller Irish readers just can't put down. From the Civil War to the Celtic Tiger, books on Irish social and economic history continue to be cash cows for Irish publishers and authors, writes Brian O'Connell . pIslanders make another trip to 'Pigtown'
ARTSCAPE: MIKE FINN'S Pigtown is back in Limerick for one night only. The award-winning play, a fast-paced, humorous and moving theatrical journey through the history of 20th-century Limerick, seen through the eyes of one man, was first produced by Limerick's Island Theatre Company in 1999, directed by Terry Devlin. p
A city of nightlife and wildlife
We often think that we have to go beyond a city's boundaries to experience the joys of nature. But with almost 50 per cent of Dublin made up of green spaces - 25 per cent in private gardens and 20 per cent in public parks - this is not the case with the capital, writes Sylvia Thompson . pMysterious influx of the hardy white heron
ANOTHER LIFE: The only herons on our shores are the big, old-fashioned, gawky sort, unfurling themselves from the channel to fly with contemplative wingbeats, neck tucked back and long legs trailing in the wind - Máire fhada, long Mary, in the local lore, writes Michael Viney . pHORIZONS
Carbon countdown The urgency of shifting to a low-carbon economy, the importance of people-power and environmental governance for sustainable development are key issues for the World Conservation Union ( www.iucn.org ). p
Forbidden love among daffodils
BIOGRAPHY: The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth By Frances Wilson, Faber & Faber, 300pp. £18.99 'I wandered lonely as a cloud," begins William Wordsworth's best-known poem - only he wasn't alone. His sister Dorothy was with him when they came upon the daffodils beside the lake, and it was she who devised the metaphor of the flowers tossing their heads and dancing in the breeze. pInconceivable torment
MEMOIR: Waiting for Daisy, By Peggy Orenstein Bloomsbury, 224pp. £12.99 The Japanese word for a miscarried foetus is mizuko, meaning "water child", a being who "flows between life and death, but belongs to neither". pSex, drugs and rock'n'roll clichés
FICTION: I Play the Drums In a Band called Okay, By Toby Litt, Penguin, 269 pp. £12.99 It's good to see Toby Litt has adapted the quintessential rock 'n' roll songwriting motif, Don't Bore Us Get to The Chorus, in his new novel. pHow the US lied to itself
CURRENT AFFAIRS: The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about America, By Susan Faludi, Atlantic Books, 336pp. £12.99 As the Twin Towers crumbled in 2001, the event was already being swaddled in myth. And as Susan Faludi argues in this stylishly written, extraordinarily brave book, it was myth of a peculiarly gendered kind. pSending out the wrong smoke signals
HUMOUR: The Order of the Phoenix Park, By Twenty Major, Hachette Books Ireland, 304pp. €9.99 The Order of the Phoenix Park by Twenty Major is the worst book I have ever finished. Admittedly, I made it just 50 pages into The Da Vinci Code , which this satirises, and about the same into the first Ross O'Carroll-Kelly book, which this apes. Between them, those books sold approximately 40,100,000 copies, worldwide. pA rebel who found his cause
BIOGRAPHY: Roger Casement: Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary, By Seamus O'Siochain, Lilliput Press, 656pp. €40 Of the lives of prominent Irish figures of the 19th and 20th centuries, that of Roger Casement presents by a clear margin the most insuperable difficulties to the biographer. Casement's life was not the fleshed-out life of the politician. pA magic canvas ride through old India
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: Anila's Journey, By Mary Finn, Walker Books, 320 pp, £6.99 Inspired by an 18th-century oil painting of a young Indian woman by Thomas Hickey, which hangs in the National Gallery in Dublin, Ma ry Finn has created a story of great cultural and emotional depth. pA last stand for high standards
MEDIA: American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media, By Neil Henry, University of California Press, 326pp. £14.95 On December 3rd, 2004, the BBC World satellite television network cut to its studio in Paris for an exclusive interview with Jude Finisterra, spokesman for the giant chemical corporation Dow. The world's most respected news-gathering organisation had a scoop. pTreasures from a bottomless pit
FICTION: The Seventh Well, By Fred Wander, translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta, 155pp. £12.99 In 1975, an Italian chemist, who was also a published poet and writer, published a remarkable memoir. It was The Periodic Table ; the writer was Primo Levi. Almost a decade later it was translated into English and was published in London in the spring of 1985. It is an incredible work, a meditation about being human as much as about keeping alive. p'The Irish Times' Poetry Now shortlist
AWARD SHORTLIST: The shortlist for this year's Irish Times Poetry Now award is announced today. It includes the latest books by a number of prominent Irish poets, as well as a debut collection. The five selected titles are: Secular Eden - Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 by Harry Clifton, the author's first new full collection since 1994; Out of Breath by Eamon Grennan; Reality Check by Dennis O'Driscoll, Black Moon by Matthew Sweeney and The Boy in the Ring , by Dave Lordan, which is the poet's first collection. pMiller book's Monroe gossip
LOOSE LEAVES: COULD THERE be more revelations about Marilyn Monroe? Weidenfeld & Nicolson, who are bringing out a biography of Arthur Miller next January, say the book has new material on the playwright's marriage to the iconic actress. pPAPERBACKS
A selection of the latest paperbacks reviewed p
Cleaning out the criminals
TV REVIEW: PAUL WILLIAMS sits hunched over his notepad in his discreetly parked car, five o'clock shadow wrestling with his chin as dusk settles over the fearless journalist's ragged stamping ground. pDon't settle for turkey jerky
RADIO REVIEW: So, there I was in my kitchen on Tuesday afternoon, somewhere between the radio and the sink, smoothie jug in one hand, strawberries and banana in the other. Orla Barry's Life! (Newstalk 106-108, Mon-Fri) stopped me in my pantofole. (That's Italian for slippers.) pI'm there, 'Er, you're not the goy who chased me out of that aportment in Milltown? Because that girl told me she was single'
Today must be payback day - Cillian wants wedge for his cor, and some goy wants to apologise for giving me wedgies in school . . . p
