Kevin Toolis – författare

Kevin Toolis investigated the lives of men and women who, for the twenty-five years of the IRA's war with Britain formed the backbone of its effort. Each chapter explores a world in which history and the republican (and loyalist) interpretation of it dominate lives and deaths. Rebel Hearts does not seek to explain the roots of the conflict in Northern Ireland in a direct historical narrative form, but constructs, and reconstructs, its history through a series of connected and highly detailed individual portraits.The book is now updated with two long new chapters on all the latest developments.'One of the strengths of Kevin Toolis's compelling, chilling, coldly brilliant book is that it reawakens the mind to the reality of why they took place ... easily the best book I have read on the Troubles' John Sweeney, Literary Review 'An honest and important book, essential for anyone who wants to assess what has been happening for the past twenty-five years in 'Northern Ireland' and what is likely to happen next' Robert Kee, Irish Times

Death is a whisper in the Anglo-Saxon world. But on a remote island, off the coast of County Mayo, it has a louder voice. The local radio station runs a thrice-daily roll-call of the recently departed. The islanders keep vigil with the corpse and share in the sorrow of the bereaved. The living and the dead are bound together in the oldest rite of humanity. In My Father's Wake, Kevin Toolis gives an intimate, eye-witness account of the death and wake of his father, celebrating the spiritual depth of the Irish Wake and asking if we too can find a better way to deal with our mortality, by living and loving in the acceptance of death.

How should we conquer death? Our eternal existential question. The unspoken why of all action and thought.Death is all around us but unseen. A shadow companion who haunts our gnawing anxieties over what the future holds. The virus. The stab of doubt in every lump beneath the skin. Can anyone overcome the fear of dying?Drawing on the wisdom of the ancients, from the Aztecs and the Iliad to the Irish Wake, Nine Rules to Conquer Death provides the answer to those eternal mortal fears and longings. Kevin Toolis distils insights drawn from millennia of human experience into a profound and punchy guide to dying – and living – well.Why life would be terrible if we did not die. Why we should embrace our mortality, and see the life-affirming necessity of sharing the company of the dead. Nine Rules up-ends every fear and presumption we hold about death to help us live a more authentic, fear-free life. Nine Rules is a guidebook like no other.