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Paperbacks Tom Widger

Rebel Heart: George Lennon, Flying Column Commander

Mother from Hell: Two Brothers, A Sadistic Mother, Childhood Destroyed

Notes From Walnut Tree Farm

In Praise of Football

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Rebel Heart: George Lennon, Flying Column Commander By Terence O'Reilly, Mercier Press €20 286pps

READERS won't find some of Lennon's recollections in the official histories of the 1916-1922 period. That is both a strength and weakness. O'Reilly acquired Lennon's unpublished memoirs, and just how many of Lennon's recollections are played up? How truthful, how varnished? And just how reliable was Lennon's memory when he came to write his memoirs? Certainly this is Boy's Own stuff, the memories of a mere boy, 16 years old when he first took up a rifle. Four years later, he was the youngest combatant ever to lead a flying column in his native Waterford. Stuff of legend. I heard about him while growing up, him and the fanatical Liam Lynch, both fiercely anti-Treatyites. Where the book gains strength is in the everyday personal lives of the combatants, something usually absent from official histories. For example, there is one account of a battle-hardened crew of Republicans picking up a badly wounded colleague: "They threw him into the back of a lorry and drove to Cappoquin, stopping at every pub on the way." Boy's Own? No way of knowing, but apart from that, the book has many fine things in it. Particularly, Lennon's visits home from the States in 1971 to an Ireland he found "polite, courteous and charming". What if he were to return to today's Ireland?

Mother from Hell: Two Brothers, A Sadistic Mother, Childhood Destroyed By Ken and Patrick Doyle with Nicola Pierce, O'Brien Press €12 230pps

THIS is a dangerous book, a misery memoir that I'd usually pass over. However, the details have already been revealed in a Sunday paper with, as far as I know, no denials from family members. This is woeful material and readers should steel themselves. A lad comes home from school to his mother. No chats about school or how he got on. Instead, his mother accuses him (falsely) of taking money and whacks him all over the kitchen, every part of his body which is now naked. Next he is gagged and tied to a chair: "The real beating was now about to begin." She beat him earlier too, while he was still in the womb. She punched herself again and again in the stomach, screaming "I don't want this f***ing child." Bleak.

Notes From Walnut Tree Farm By Roger Deakin, Penguin £9 310pps

NOW for something blessedly different. Walnut Tree Farm is in Sussex, and so wonderfully relaxed that you can hear the walnut trees stretch and yawn. Take your time as you meander through this very beautiful book. Owner of the farm is Roger Deakin, a chronicler of nature; the book is a journal of one year, month by lonely month. Maybe he wanted it that way, though there are hints along the way that he would have welcomed some company. Alone, he records the death of one year and the birth of another. He cultivates the company of wild animals, once nursing a dying hedgehog back to life by warming it behind an Aga. This gentle soul had just one complaining rant; how humans wilfully destroy the countryside. He died three years ago at 63, just after finishing Wildwood. So go out and buy it. This reviewer intends to.

In Praise of Football by Gabriel Fitzmaurice, Mercier Press €13 95pps

FITMAURICE'S great bran tub of sports goodies – alright, it's more of a bran bin, coming in at fewer than 100 pages – contains a combination of craic from the crowd ("God sake McHale, you wouldn't get a kick in a stampede") and quips from the lips of the broadcasters (Micheál "We welcome our listeners from Brazil" O Muircheartaigh: "Pat Fox is motoring well now, but here comes Joe Rabbitte on his tail. I've seen it all now, a Rabbitte chasing a Fox around Croke Park.") The other famous Micheál is quoted throughout, O'Hehir, whose voice brought us children scampering in from the streets on Sunday. The craic from the crowd, the quips from the lips, this time from a player: "We're taking this match awful serious, we're training three times a week, some of the boys are off the beer since Tuesday." That was an Offaly hurler...

Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World By Timothy Brook, Profile £10 280pps

THE cover of Brook's book has a Dutchman wearing a bloody big hat. Art experts be warned: the book isn't on how Vermeer painted the famous interior, 'Officer and Laughing Girl'. Instead, it's about how the officer "acquired" the hat. (Colonisers always acquire, never plunder.) The hat was of a stiff variety of felt from North America. By the close of the 1600s, European beavers were extinct, so the French army wiped out American natives and did a world trade in beaver felt. Marco Polo came back from China with tales of vast wealth to be "acquired", so the Portuguese and Spanish sailed to China to acquire it. Silver plate from South America found its way to Europe, needless to say at the cost of millions of indigenous indians. Sobering.