Anthony Cronin delivers straight-to-the-point honesty--no room for neutrality here! such a pleasure to read something so opinionated and SAUCY! It's sure to put a smile on anyone's face--even if you know nothing about the 'art world.' Thumbs up for a man with a voice and a few funny theories!

Given the recent rash of attention devoted to the office of the President and the general poor quality of writing associated with this phenomenon, it is refreshing to finally find a book that is insightful and is carefully researched. Anyone who truly loves reading and studing the executive branch and especially the implications for power in a post-cold war setting will appreciate this book. It is without hesitation that I recommend this book to all those with even a passing interest in the subject.

Two thumbs up!!

This is a beautifully written book about a brillant frustrated man, who was a great novelist, newspaper columnist and a competent bureaucrat at the same time. Interesting to an American for that insider's look at those segments of Irish life, it is also valueable to an Irish American Catholic for it is explanation of how O'Brien's convinced Catholicism limited his intellectual curiosity.

This book is the definitive biography, whatever quibbles one may have with the author's judgments, aesthetic or otherwise, about O'Nolan's life or art. Think instead about what you get with this book: an author who knew the subject personally, in-depth research into O'Nolan's origins and childhood, an intimate knowledge of the Irish literary scene in the interwar and postwar years, and the ability to show how these shaped the subject intellectually and psychologically. I disagree with a few of Cronin's assessments: I think The Dalkey Archive was the pinnacle of O'Nolan's novelistic achievements. While I agree he should have written more novels, I also feel that his time writing newspaper columns was well spent; there's more wit in most of those columns than in many novels by lesser writers. This book satisfies one of the most important criteria of a biography, that it be a good read in and of itself: Cronin is an excellent writer.

Cronin is an affectionate biographer but thankfully not a hagiographer. His personal acquaintance with Brian O'Nolan gives him insight into the various personal and artistic personae that O'Nolan adopted: Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, etc. Cronin spends too much energy speculating as to why O'Brien never managed to fulfil the artistic potential of his first two novels. It is, perhaps, unfair to fault Cronin, as this failure frustrates anyone who has read O'Brien's early work. However, Cronin's tone occasionally becomes pious and judgemental of O'Nolan. One wishes this tone would have extended to other aspects of O'Nolan's life (specifically the personal); Cronin evokes and explains the mind set of Dublin in the early to mid twentieth century, but he seems wary of really examining it. In all fairness, that might have been another book altogether. In sum, the book is readable, often as funny as O'Brien himself (and occasionally just as sad), and useful for the student of Flann O'Brien. It fills

A careful, highly readable and sometimes very amusing account of the life of the Irish novelist, playwright, theatre director and sports enthusiast. This gives a nuanced and sensitive account of the Irish background from which Beckett at first painfully extracted himself to a new life in France, but which he was always attached to sentimentally and creatively, never being too busy to meet with a young writer from Ireland, or to drink with old Irish friends and wax nostalgic about the Liffey. This book, while generally very admiring (Cronin has no time for the last novel), is actually more discerning and knowledgeable about Beckett's affairs emotional, literary and dramatic, especially in the later years of his career when Cronin was one of the first to write about him at length in the TLS and elsewhere, as well as to meet him and ask questions such as, "Krapp seems to think he had the possibility of happiness...?" To which Beckett calmly replied, "That doesn't mean he did though, does it?"

You get a fair sense of the man and his times, and a more modulated sense of his slow climb to success, even after "Waiting for Godot" made his name. Never has fame seemed less romantic. Cronin is that best of acquaintance-biographers - no fool, but not an assassin either. Fun as well as thorough. I can't think what will come to light to make a better biography possible.

For a pretty fat bio, I found this a surprisingly easy and swift read. Cronin, who certainly knows the lay of the land, the type of people, and even some of the actual folks Beckett knew, seems a fair and judicious biographer. I found the book most useful in charting Beckett's development as an artist from the callow "knowingness" of his early novels and poems to the wry despair of his mature work. One is impressed both by Beckett's inconsistent touchiness about the handling of his work by adapters, and by his quiet generosity with near strangers as well as friends. Cronin includes plenty of delightful trivia, from quotes ("I am not a philosopher; one can only speak of what is in front of one and that is simply a mess") to the fact that Beckett always accented the first syllable of Godot.

This is a valiant attempt to understand the man and the artist. The slow and unconventional evolution of Beckett's art is well described. This biography is, I feel, honest [in as much as any biography can be such] and does not mythologize. Sad that in Beckett's last days he appeared to be consumed with remorse.

Cronin gives the reader an enjoyable, sometimes amusing, portrayal of three of of Ireland's greatest modern writers: Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O'Brien. His descriptions of pre-fame Brendan Behan are excellent. They show the young and adventurous Behan as he was before fame, drink, and self-parody overtook him. It was somewhat disappointing that Flann O'Brien, author of skilled and imaginative works (At-Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman) was himself an alcoholic with, nonetheless, a bourgeois, sometimes puritanical personality. All these writers (and others everywhere)tended to be petty, egoistic, and hyper-critical, especially about their contemporaries' work. But this does not make them uninteresting, and one should always separate art from artist.