Stirring bone chilling account of the first authentic colonial venture in English history, a venture that held captive a whole generation of the best that England and Ireland could muster. Hard copy new edition

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I had got this 1977 account of the Elizabethan wars in Ireland in the expectation that it might be a somewhat traditionalist approach to the period, to counterbalance the more revisionist accounts I had been reading over the last few years. In fact it's more of a hobbyist's labour of love, concentrating very much on the sequence of events in Munster and trying boldly if not completely successfully to tie England's Irish policy to Queen Elizabeth's state of mind. I actually found Berleth's exposition of the detail of events pretty good, and enjoyed his chapter on literature, especially The Faerie Queene (which I have been reading at not quite a canto per day since July). But the internal chronology is a bit weird, jumping back and forth through decades (thus weakening the basic story which is of cycles of devastation and resettlement), and the entire Ulster war and Flight of the Earls is tacked on very hastily in a final chapter. He also combines a juicy eye for the personal detail with less convincing psychoanalysis of some of the key players, though I suppose that's a game we can all play. The maps are disappointing as well. ( )

This is an absolutely masterpiece written by a sublime stylist whose wonderful prose documents the dark underbelly of Elizabethan society with relentless precision.

If you like your Elizabethans all cuddly and courtly then don't read Berleth. His are red in tooth and claw; amoral, rapacious and all too believeable.

Elizabeth handled her Irish domain in much the same way Putin handled Chechnya - with comparable results. The condition she reduced the country to became the talk of every European court and she wept in fury, as one after another, her ambassadors reported that they could not conduct any business without accepting protests over the outrages she had inflicted there. Matters well documented in the court records of the time. The most disturbing aspect of which was the regular use of famine as a tactic to achieve military aims which she was unwilling to finance from the public purse.

Half of all the soldiers she sent on expedition to Ireland, deserted within days of arrival, selling their kit and disappearing forever into the country's unmapped interior. Half of those who remained, succumbed to fevers of one kind or another.

There are also strong parallels between the modern-day free-marketeers who bled Iraq dry and the 'undertakers' of Elizabeth's time who flocked to Ireland to feed upon a country that ultimately, was unable to sustain them.

Read it and weep for what might have been.

This is an absolutely masterpiece written by a sublime stylist whose wonderful prose documents the dark underbelly of Elizabethan society with relentless precision.

If you like your Elizabethans all cuddly and courtly then don't read Berleth. His are red in tooth and claw; amoral, rapacious and all too believeable.

Elizabeth handled her Irish domain in much the same way Putin handled Chechnya - with comparable results. The condition she reduced the country to became the talk of every European court and she wept in fury, as one after another, her ambassadors reported that they could not conduct any business without accepting protests over the outrages she had inflicted there. Matters well documented in the court records of the time. The most disturbing aspect of which was the regular use of famine as a tactic to achieve military aims which she was unwilling to finance from the public purse.

Half of all the soldiers she sent on expedition to Ireland, deserted within days of arrival, selling their kit and disappearing forever into the country's unmapped interior. Half of those who remained, succumbed to fevers of one kind or another.

There are also strong parallels between the modern-day free-marketeers who bled Iraq dry and the 'undertakers' of Elizabeth's time who flocked to Ireland to feed upon a country that ultimately, was unable to sustain them.

Read it and weep for what might have been. ( )

This book covers the Elizabethan occupation of Ireland up to 1599 in considerable detail. It is written in a somewhat chaotic way, following first one line of events then another, which makes it rather difficult to follow. It describes events quite vividly, and in a sufficiently unbiased way that by the end of the book I did not like anybody involved. In a nutshell, there are no good guys here. "Watching" the deliberate destruction and self-destruction of the Irish culture and countryside was a fairly unpleasant experience. ( )