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    Michael Collins: A Biography
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    Michael Collins: A Biography
    Unavailable
    Michael Collins: A Biography
    Ebook973 pages14 hours

    Michael Collins: A Biography

    By Tim Pat Coogan

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    When President of the Irish Republic Michael Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, he remarked to Lord Birkenhead, 'I may have signed my actual death warrant.'

    In August 1922 during the Irish Civil War, that prophecy came true – Collins was shot and killed by a fellow Irishman in a shocking political assassination.

    So ended the life of the greatest of all Irish nationalists, but his visions and legacy lived on.

    This authorative and comprehensive biography presents the life of a man who became a legend in his own lifetime, whose idealistic vigour and determination were matched only by his political realism and supreme organisational abilities. Coogan's biography provides a fascinating insight into a great political leader, whilst vividly portraying the political unrest in a divided Ireland, that can help to shape our understanding of Ireland's recent tumultuous socio-political history.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHead of Zeus
    Release dateDec 16, 2015
    ISBN9781784975364
    Unavailable
    Michael Collins: A Biography
    Author

    Tim Pat Coogan

    Tim Pat Coogan is Ireland's best-known historical writer. His 1990 biography of Michael Collins rekindled interest in Collins and his era. He is also the author of The IRA, Long Fellow, Long Shadow, 1916: The Mornings After and The Twelve Apostles.

    Read more from Tim Pat Coogan

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    Reviews for Michael Collins

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      Flawed, but interesting biography of a flawed, but interesting man.
    • 4/5
      This is, in my opinion, quite a balanced portrait of Collins by Coogan. He is clearly a fan of his muse but does try to present his thesis with a critical eye. The book is well written and argued and flows well. Collins is seen as a simple soldier dealing with nefarious politicians out to stab him in the back. But this image is far from the reality. This book is far superior to his next work on de Valera where Coogan lets his bias, some would say bordering on the extreme, get the better of him far too often.
    • 5/5
      Michael Collins was an extraordinary man, the inventor, it is said, of modern urban guerilla warfare; the man who led the war to end 700 years of British occupation of Ireland. Here was a man that was not a cog in in some vast socio-economic machine, whose only desire is "to just get along." He was one of those who didn't experience the benefits of the coexistence of two cultures in one land, because one of them was politically and economically savaging the other. He did not have as his primary goal in life to accumulate the accouterments of a materialistic civilization for himself, nor did he ever have a mortgage to pay. He never owned a car. He never formed a family. He never knew such idiots who populate the safety committees of the industrial organizations in our own time, nor the phonies who infest our academies, longing for tenure. He loved his culture, as it was, and resented outsiders who had only scorn for it. He was a leader of men, a man of action, a stickler for detail, who always knew what he wanted to accomplish. His physical courage was unimaginable to most men, even to those of his own time and place. His outstanding political skills and ability to do what was required to achieve the achievable was unmatched by any of the politicos and hotheads who surrounded him. His primary task in the rebellion was in counter-intelligence, which he came to see required the assassination of informants and torturers, detectives and G-men, and the higher-ups of the British intelligence services who directed it all and placed a price on his head. This culminated in a "Bloody Sunday" in which his men attacked the "Cairo Gang" in their lodgings, some still in their beds, killing 19 of them. The Brits retaliated with a massacre of unarmed spectators at a football match, but ultimately it resulted in the opening of negotiations. Incredibly, Collins was chosen to lead the negotiating team, and wound up across the table from Lloyd George, Austen Chamberlin, and Winston Churchill. He brought home an agreement for the Free State. Coogan tells his tale very thoroughly, at length, and with a satisfying balance of an attention to fact, considered speculation, and telling anecdote. He is an accomplished historian who knows his subject intimately. The author has written on the order of a dozen books on the modern history of Ireland, and is widely recognized for his authority, but not necessarily for an "objectivity" that belies the need for drawing lessons that should be the goal of any historian. The book is at times, perhaps, a little too detailed for the general reader, but it is something of a "definitive biography", so I can forgive him for this. It is over 500 pages long with a very good bibliography, footnotes, and a terrific index. The 17 pictures are glossy and clear and add a lot to the story. One of the most rewarding of things about reading this book is that it led me, I think, to a greater understanding of the events in Iraq, also suffering under an occupation by a hostile power, being fought by patriots and coreligionists in an urban setting, whose enemies from another land and religion label them terrorists and murderers.