Rick O'Shea

It has been an astonishing couple of years for Irish published and Irish written short stories, hasn’t it? I genuinely feel like I should apologise that this one got caught up in my backlog of reviews from the last few weeks – I read it just after publication and it’s actually one of the books of the month I’ve chosen for April over on my book club on FB. You know every now and then you get hypnotised by a writer’s style or a series of short stories? For me, Vertigo brings both of those to the table. It’s less […]

See, this is either going to float your boat (appalling pun apologised for) or it won’t. I developed an interest in the whole topic of the movement of globalised goods a few years back after reading Alain De Botton describing the journey of a tuna fish from the seas around Sri Lanka to a suburban Tesco in the UK, so this one had me at the cover page. Rose George’s utterly fascinating (to me anyway) account of a 5 week trip from the UK to Singapore through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, passing along the pirate-infested coast of Somalia, is […]

Briefly, this is an occasionally interesting, sometimes factually dense, ever so often dull series of chapters on neurology. If you’ve read Oliver Sacks over the years or even Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast And Slow or the like, I’m afraid you might not find much new here. I did love the section on certain types of epileptic seizures potentially leading to religious conversion even if that did scare the bejeesus *into* me. That was a new one. As was the idea of athletes doing “mental training” when coming back from an injury (literally imaging themselves out on the track or bike). […]

Yes, I’m very late to this particular table so I’ll keep this particularly brief. Rob Doyle’s first novel from 2014 is a beautiful, vicious, angry, touching, all too real portrayal of a Dublin many of people see, some of us know people who lived in and one we hope our own teenagers never, ever encounter although we fear they may. Four young lads spend their first summer after finishing school wandering the streets and beaches of Dublin (and Boston) drunk, stoned, angry, depressed, suicidal and worse. Hard going in many places if you’re thin-skinned or reticent when it comes to grit, dirt, […]

The Sanctum is an entirely plausible idea. A huge silo in the ground built and sold to rich types to hide out in the eventuality of nuclear war, zombie apocalypse, or, as in the case of when we join the various cast of characters in Under Ground, an impending pandemic. Thing is, fairly quickly, the diverse residents (rich knobs, racist prepper types, the Sanctum’s builder, a Korean-American family with a shut-in father) find themselves cut off from the outside world (not going to spoil how that happens for you) and then people start to turn up dead… While a bit […]

I’ll keep this one brief as this book does the same and is exactly what I had hoped it would be. Cockburn addresses the history of the creation of IS, its roots in the Sunni/Shia conflict in Iraq, who’s financing it and the demarcation lines (at the time) in less than 200 pages. He succinct, very well versed in his subject and I came out of it knowing far more and having a far more clear picture than when I went in. I suppose the only weak point it might have is that the conflict in Syria and Islamic State attacks […]