1916: The Easter Rising |
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Tim Pat Coogan
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Pages: 192 (Paperback)
ISBN: 0753818523
Pub: Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
Pub date: 2005-03-03
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 103195
Reader Reviews:
Gripping account of the Rising, but short on detail (5/7 people found this helpful)
If you are looking for an exciting, easily-readable account of the Easter Rising, then this is the book for you. It's written in Tim Pat Coogan's usual engaging style, and covers the background to the Rising, the events and the key personalities. The accounts of the street fighting are very well done, with lots of anecdotes from those who fought.
The only criticisms I have are firstly that it's very sympathetic to the Rebels - of course, this is no bad thing in itself, but it does affect the author's analysis of the events and reduces the book's objectivity, which makes it harder to see what was really going on. Secondly, it leaves out a lot of details that are covered in Charles Townshend's 1916 book, such as Austin Stack's critical failure to signal to the Germans to land the guns at Fenit, and the reasons for the failure of most of the country outside Dublin to rise, especially "rebel" Cork.
This is no dry academic account though, so maybe it's unfair to fault Coogan on these grounds. It's a great, brief history of the single most important event in modern Irish history, which started us on the path to freedom.
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Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> History -> Archaeology
Books -> Subjects -> History -> World History
Books -> Subjects -> History -> General
Books -> Refinements -> Language (feature_browse-bin) -> English