Independent Spirit: Essays Review
The collected essays of the late Irish writer, who has belatedly been acclaimed as a rare European master. In these literary, personal and political pieces, most of which were originally published in small Irish newspapers, Butler treats topics from anti-fascism to the tone of Irish country life with uncommon elegance, power and range.
Read more...
Independent Spirit: Essays Specifications
These essays, selected from four volumes published in Ireland in 1985, reveal a man with a fascinating breadth of experience and the ability to write of his life with wit, style, and integrity. Born into a Protestant Anglo-Irish family and educated at Oxford, Butler traveled widely, studying and teaching in Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the Balkans for nearly 15 years. During Hitler's reign of terror in the early 1940s, he even helped Jews escape through Vienna. When his father died, he returned to Ireland and turned his experiences into essays, writing about European and world issues--sectarianism in the former Yugoslavia, the struggle between the Roman Catholic Church and Communism, the sending of 4,051 children to the Auschwitz death camp--from a broad humanistic (yet still very Irish) perspective. Hubert Butler died in Ireland in 1991 as a relatively unknown yet luminous talent who observed this century with a rigorous eye.
0 comments:
Post a Comment