Mick Fanning might only be 28 but he already knows how a lot of things feel that most of us never will. Mick has overcome personal tragedy and career-threatening injury on his way to claiming the 2007 world surfing title. Mick tells his life story candidly - in turns funny, sensitive, thoughtful, self-deprecating - while providing intimate insights into the personal lessons gained along the way - with practical tips on surfing technique, fitness, nutrition, board design, travel, competitive strategies and mental clarity. Universally acknowledged as the most focused and driven competitive surfer of his era, Mick's approach to surfing, sports psychology, life and relationships, makes fascinating reading.
In July 1936, an army-led coup against the democratically elected republican government ushered in the Spanish Civil War. Father Alexander J. McCabe was rector of the Irish College in Salamanca when General Francisco Franco seized power a few months later and established his GHQ in the medieval city. McCabe recorded the arrival of the nationalist war machine in his diaries, vividly documenting the horror of the repression and his encounters with Franco, Nazi officers and diplomats, British and American spies and journalists, and adventurers and charlatans from around the world who flocked to Salamanca. He also observed the implosion of General Eoin O’Duffy’s ill-fated Irish Brigade, first as one of its chaplains and later mediating between the nationalist high command and O’Duffy. He unsuccessfully attempted to dissuade a disillusioned O’Duffy from returning to Ireland with the Irish Brigade in 1937. Historian Tim Fanning uses McCabe’s diaries to provide a fascinating account of life in Spain before, during and after the war, as well as McCabe’s memories of growing up in Ireland at a time of momentous change. This is the troubling and enthralling story of an eyewitness to one of the most tragic episodes in twentieth-century European history.
This is the first comprehensive study of John Thomond O'Brien, one of the most significant Irish-born figures in the history of modern South America. Born in Baltinglass, County Wicklow, in the late eighteenth-century, O'Brien emigrated to Buenos Aires in the second decade of the nineteenth century, hoping to profit from the burgeoning trade in textiles between Britain and Ireland and the River Plate. In 1813, in Buenos Aires, he enlisted as a cavalry officer in the armies fighting against Spanish rule. His actions on the battlefield, which contributed to the achievement of independence in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, and his close acquaintance with the two most famous generals of the war, Jose de San Martin and Simon Bolivar, brought him renown in South America and Europe. O'Brien criss-crossed South America during his colourful post-war career, spending time in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil and Uruguay. In the 1820s, he promoted Irish emigration to Argentina, launched the highest sailing ship in the world on Lake Titicaca and led the campaign of support for O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation among the Irish in Buenos Aires. In the 1830s, he explored the Amazon for gold and was imprisoned in Buenos Aires by the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. In the 1840s, he represented the Montevidean government in London and Paris. During the last decade of his life, before his death in 1861, he campaigned to have monuments erected across South America to the leaders of the independence campaign. O'Brien's compelling story mirrors that of a tumultuous period in Irish and South American history
Paisanos tells the epic story of the forgotten Irish men and women who changed
the face of Latin America forever from armed revolutionaries like Bernardo
O'Higgins and James Rooke to trailblazing women like Eliza Lynch and Camila
O'Gorman.
