Completely updated every year (unlike most of the competition), Frommer’s Ireland features gorgeous color photos of the fishing villages, seaside cliffs, and quaint country pubs that await you. It’s a highly personal guide that’s fun to read and even more fun to use on the road. Our expert author offers insights into how to discover the real Ireland. You’ll find complete details on lovely small towns, natural wonders, castles, literary landmarks, world-class golf courses, mysterious ancient ruins, and Dublin’s cutting-edge nightlife. You’ll even get a free color fold-out map, and an online directory that makes trip-planning a snap!

Mike Cronin “Irish History For Dummies"
A rip-roaring ride through the history of the Emerald Isle
Ireland’s story is an amazingly dramatic and intense one – and today the influence of Irish culture can be felt around the globe. This book helps you find out why, taking you on a rollercoaster journey through the highs and lows of Ireland’s past including invasions, battles, executions, religious divide, uprisings, emigration – and Riverdance!
Mike Cronin is a lecturer at the Centre for Irish Programmes, Boston College, Dublin. He has written 5 books on Irish history.
Discover:
When and how Ireland became Celtic
Ireland and Britain’s complex relationship
The evolution of Irish culture
How Irish emigration has affected the world
Northern Ireland’s rocky road to peace

Ireland and Scotland: Literature and Culture, State and Nation, 1966-2000 (Oxford English Monographs)
By Ray Ryan  

While political connections between Ireland and Scotland have been vigorously promoted in recent years, Ray Ryan presents the first sustained, comparative study of literature and culture from both sites. Ryan's focus is on the Irish state and the Scottish nation. How does literature from the Republic create the cultural shape and personality of the Irish state? Through comparison with Scotland, a stateless nation, Ryan argues that crucial themes in Irish culture emerge with new force and clarity: themes such as Republicanism and colonialism, the city and rural divide, and the partition of the island into separate 'southern' and 'northern' spheres. Analysing a broad range of Irish and Scottish literary texts, Ryan shifts attention from the traditionally defined canon of Irish culture, and establishes the relevance of Scotland for any future discussion of Irish cultural contexts. Offering a radical intervention across a range of disciplines, this book is essential reading for all those working on Ireland, on Scotland, and on contemporary English and British culture.

Women in a Celtic Church: Ireland 450 - 1150
by Christina Harrington

This work is a groundbreaking study of the varieties of holy life available to, and pursued by, early medieval Irish women. The author explores a wide range of source material from legal texts, saints' lives, litanies, penitentials, canons, and poetry in order to illuminate female religious life and changes in attitudes towards it over time.

Considering that this is a scholarly publication, it is a surprisingly smooth read. The author has delved deeply into the maelstrom of Irish and Latin texts that make up the source material, resulting in a fresh and sometimes penetrating analysis of the state of holy women of various sorts in the church of Ireland circa 450-1150. However, this book is not for the impatient, the argument can sometimes take some time to build; be patient though. While most passages from the sources are provided in english translation, a knowledge of Latin would be helpful for the numerous short bits that are left untranslated, but this is not crucial for following the argument.

Myths and Folk-lore of Ireland
by Jeremiah Curtin
(Rare Book Collection)

Twenty folk tales representing hundreds of years of the collective Irish imagination transport readers to a world where everything is alive and anything can happen! Vivid descriptions of battles with giants, dead men who come back to life, humans imprisoned in animals' bodies, heroes with incredible strength, and more.
The myth tales in this volume were collected by the author in the West of Ireland, in Kerry, Galway, and Donegal, during the year 1887.