-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A Personal History of Modern Ireland
by Fintan O'Toole
A celebrated Irish writer's magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world.
Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government was in despair because all the young people were leaving. 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, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society―perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history.
Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis.
A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O'Toole in coruscating prose 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.
16 pages of color illustrations
"Irish journalist and critic O'Toole offers a chronicle, personal and historical, of the profound changes that have come to his homeland in his lifetime...astute...A superb illustration of how the personal is the political and can be the universal." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] forceful account of how Ireland entered the modern age...In O'Toole's case, sharp reporting makes good history." - Library Journal (starred review)
"[M]asterly, fascinating...O'Toole, a journalist, historian and academic, is Ireland's preeminent public intellectual...We Don't Know Ourselves is surely his masterpiece, a long detailed and beautifully executed study...O'Toole has a marvelously sharp eye for the illuminating fact, the telling anecdote, the overlooked or forgotten piece of history; but he also has a poet's gift for figurative language." - Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"[S]parkling...we encounter O'Toole as a Zelig-like figure with an amusingly personal chain of connections to the great events and characters...the quiet heroes of We Don't Know Ourselves are the Irish people, who O'Toole shows to have been ahead of their political and spiritual leaders in being ready to face the contradictions that underpinned national life...an uplifting, almost playful read, with suggestive analysis lying beneath skillful vignettes." - Financial Times (UK)
"Sweeping, authoritative and profoundly intelligent." - Colm Tóibín, The Guardian (UK)
This information about We Don't Know Ourselves was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Fintan O'Toole is a columnist for the Irish Times and a professor at Princeton University. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Guardian and the author of several books. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and Dublin, Ireland.
If you liked We Don't Know Ourselves, try these:
by Natasha Brown
Published 2026
Remember—words are your weapons, they're your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature" (The Sunday Times).
by Audrey Magee
Published 2023
In 1979, as violence erupts all over Ireland, two outsiders travel to a small island off the west coast in search of their own answers, despite what it may cost the islanders.
by Ruth Gilligan
Published 2021
Set in the gothic wilds of Ireland, The Butchers' Blessing is a haunting and unforgettable thriller brimming with secrecy, tradition, and superstition.
L.A. Women by Ella Berman
Two ambitious writers in 1960s LA face betrayal when one writes a novel based on the other's life.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
