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80,000 words hardcover
Finished books available
Canada: Doubleday, Fall 2005
US: Carroll & Graf, Jan 2007
UK: Aurum, Oct 2006
(Photo: Bill O'Brien)
John Doyle has been a critic for The Globe and Mail since 1997 and has written its daily television column since 2000. He has appeared on numerous TV and radio programs to talk about popular culture, television, soccer, and Ireland. His writing has appeared in Report On Business magazine, Elle Canada, Flare, En Route, Books In Canada, The Irish Times, and the Toronto Star, among others. John Doyle lives happily in Toronto.
Growing Up Irish in the Television Age
by John Doyle
IN AN IRISH MEMOIR LIKE NONE BEFORE IT, CELEBRATED COLUMNIST JOHN DOYLE SURVEYS CHILDHOOD MEMORIES AND SOCIAL HISTORY, USING THE EVER-RELEVANT WORLD OF TELEVISION TO THROW LIGHT ON THE DARK, RECENT PAST OF IRELAND
- A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2005
- A CBC Radio Top 25 Book of 2005
- A Commentary.ca Top 15 Book of 2005
The Globe and Mail's celebrated critic John Doyle was born in the small Irish town of Nenagh in 1957; his father purchased the family's first television in 1962, and nothing was ever quite the same. American westerns suggested a model of manhood to young John that had nothing to do with the rigid boundaries of small-town Ireland, and The Late, Late Show, Ireland's homegrown talk show and variety program, brought frank discussion about sex into Irish living rooms, eliciting howls of protest from priests and conservative politicians. As the 1960s and 70s wore on, television transmitted the violent turmoil of Northern Ireland directly into the Doyles' home-and broadcast it far beyond as well. Television both pointed John toward a wider, brighter future and helped to yank Ireland out of its past.
Funny, moving, insightful, and always engaging, this is the story of a boy and a country transformed by television. It is an Irish memoir like none before it.
PRAISE FOR A GREAT FEAST OF LIGHT
“What better way for a television critic to structure his memoir of growing up in 1960s and 1970s Ireland than around the TV programmes he remembers from his childhood? Recalling The Man from Uncle means remembering the first confusing year at secondary school, and the belief that Ilya Kuryakin would have dealt with the upheaval more successfully. Monty Python is linked with the discovery that authority could be legitimately mocked; The Late Late Show with the realisation that Ireland was slowly changing. Doyle's book is amiably amusing (darkening only when student days and bitter frustration with the country's conservatism coincide) and shows that the box in the corner of the room can offer a useful route map to the past.” — THE SUNDAY TIMES, UK
“Engaging and very readable.... Doyle has a way of taking something that might be mundane and even campy to American eyes (e.g., Dallas) and filling it with whole new worlds of meaning from his vantage point in time and place.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL
“A gentle, funny book.... [Doyle] writes the best kind of cultural history, based not on statistics and generalisations but on first hand experience.... [This] book crackles with unexpected angles, and is written with a kind of naive delight. It is the ideal present for anyone given to pontification about the brain-deadening effects of television.” — THE SUNDAY TIMES, UK
“This is an absolutely wonderful book. Whether or not you have the slightest interest in Ireland or television, this coming-of-age memoir is completely captivating as it provides a three-dimensional portrait of a country and its people in the 1960s and '70s. And John Doyle's prose is pure poetry--graceful and elegant, with a real Irish lilt.” — TELEVISION QUARTERLY
“This book is a delight.... Beautifully written, both humorous and sad.” — MONTREAL GAZETTE
“...a witty and touching memoir.” — IRISH INDEPENDENT
“Doyle does a marvelous job of dissecting the cultures.... A marvelous read, with keen insights and laugh-out-loud moments...” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review
“E]vocative detail...a personal coming-of-age story.... Doyle writes with fine Hibernian garrulity and ease, not a bother on him. For an Irish narrative, he's yer fella.” — KIRKUS REVIEWS
“The man has always had a way with words.... Always a watcher as well as a sharp listener, Doyle takes the time to paint a vivid picture.” — TORONTO STAR
“A Great Feast of Light is a sweet, well-told story.... A welcome tonic.” — EDMONTON JOURNAL
“Readers are treated to innocent but stinging impressions of the secular violence in the north, of the rude social hierarchy and of the subversive pop-culture tremors emanating from Britain which was so near and yet so far.” — CANADIAN PRESS
“A delightful memoir of the Globe and Mail television critic’s upbringing in Ireland, and the dawn of television broadcasting there.” — THE COMMENTARY.CA
“Finally, someone who obviously loves books but also loves television.... The book is deceptively sophisticated.... Doyle’s storytelling is heart wrenching.” — CBC.CA
“I had to stop reading John Doyle's A Great Feast of Light several times because I was laughing hysterically, yes, hysterically. This gifted writer has no chip on his shoulder as he writes of Northern Ireland, bigotry, violence, his awakening sexuality, family lunacy, the dying of the powerful church and its system of ecclesiastical terrorism.... Did television change Ireland for the better or the opposite? One Bush-like Irish politician said there was no sex in Ireland until the coming of television. Read Doyle's book to find out if there was anything else. I envy your journey.” — MALACHY MCCOURT
“Doyle never plays the Paddy, never lapses into sentimentalism and never once hijacks his readers into the Suffering Olympics to exploit Ireland’s tortured past. In fact, the book is deceptively sophisticated—so much so that its readability sometimes conceals the artfulness of his treatment.” — GREG KELLY, cbc.ca Arts & Entertainment
“For all its sharp insights into recent Irish history, A Great Feast of Light is as much post-McLuhan fable as Irish memoir, a gifted writer's story—funny, original, compelling—of his coming of age in one small outpost of the Global Village.” — THE GLOBE AND MAIL
“A liltingly written, passionately engaged piece of work that braids three distinct approaches into a tight, furious whole.... Doyle's book has the great virtue of being both particular and personal in its details, and broad in its imaginative and nostalgic appeal.” — JOAN BARFOOT
“Doyle traces in an idiosyncratic, but always convincing way, the effect that television had on liberating Ireland from the iron grip of the Catholic church. Once Donna Reed was happy, despite never saying the rosary or going to confession, the social landscape changed. Once civil rights and women's rights marched through the living rooms of Ireland the political landscape was forever altered. A Great Feast of Light is the perfect portrayal of the 'global village' and its consequences.” — CATHERINE GILDINER, author of Closer to the Falls
“A critic as industrious, ambitious and intelligent as John Doyle should be cherished. Any critic, in any field, becomes valuable by studying the cultural landscape and explaining to us what parts of it we should know about, whether we agree with the critic’s views or not. Doyle has this quality of curiosity: nothing televisual is alien to him.” — TORONTO LIFE
“When you're a small and in a small town people think you're blank, hardly there at all. Doyle keeps the breathless reader close and whispers ample rare sightings as if to...birdwatchers...ghosthunters.... The result is a whispering Ireland where enlightenment's a bird and insularity's a ghost and even a boy knows better than to disturb either. A great feast of enlightenment.” — GORD DOWNIE, THE TRAGICALLY HIP
“If television’s influence provides the bones for the story, Doyle’s spare and dryly funny reminiscence about the Ireland of his youth are the meat.... The colourful characters are all there, but thankfully not the unrelenting gloom that’s become the trademark of Irish memoirs.... A vivid portrait.” — VICTORIA TIMES COLONIST
“A terrific read.” — FFWD, CALGARY
“It is a delightful and original ramble; laconic, rueful and richly evocative of a time and place long gone and hardly lamented.” — THE LONDON FREE PRESS
“A Great Feast of Light is a provocative and highly entertaining read.” — THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR
“A Great Feast of Light is… gently humorous, occasionally hilarious and always enlightening…” — THE BUFFALO NEWS