Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World

The Irish Revolution has long been mythologized in American culture, but seldom understood. For too long, the story of Irish independence and its aftermath has been told only within an Anglo-Irish context. Now, in the critically acclaimed Bitter Freedom, journalist Maurice Walsh, with a novelist’s eye for the illuminating detail of everyday lives in extremis (Prospect) places revolutionary Ireland in the panorama of the global disorder born of the terrible slaughter of World War I, as well as providing a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human face of the conflict.

In this invigorating account (Spectator), Walsh demonstrates how this national revolution, which captured worldwide attention from India to Argentina, was itself shaped by international events, political, economic, and cultural. In the era of Russian Bolshevism and American jazz, developments in Europe and America had a profound effect on Ireland. Bitter Freedom is the most vivid and dramatic account of this epoch to date (Literary Review).