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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Comic, at times perceptive, collection of essays, 29 Aug 2000
The Secret World of the Irish Male should be seen for what it is: a loosely-related collection of O'Connor's newspaper columns on contemporary Irish life. While much of it tends towards the lightweight (and doesn't pretend to be otherwise) there are also moments of perception and insight such as his encounter with a young Irish migrant at a railway station in London (and the implied reality of much of the migrant experience) and his flirtation with the world of boxing. There are, however, many more moments of high comedy from the school of flirting in New York to the riotous, rambunctious World Cup diary (worth the price of admission alone). It should be understood (some reviewers seem to find it difficult) that this is a collection of laughs and tears in between O'Connor's more serious (but not always less humourous) endeavours and is such is recommended as a highly entertaining, intelligent read.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Collected writings, 25 Sep 2004
Not so much a book as a collection of newspaper articles and general musing. O'Connor is a gifted writer and on occasion has a witty turn of phrase. Unfortunately, like other books that gather together unrelated and unconnected writing, you notice a tendancy to repeat the same tricks and devices in more than one chapter. But this book will make you laugh and does give an insight into what it means to be an Irish Male that's as valid and accuate as any other.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Awful, 10 Dec 1999
By A Customer
Joseph O'Connor's continuing popularity is a goad and a mystery to those of us who still think that observing reality and writing about it are things to take a bit of time and effort over. This awful book is a collection of miscellaneous articles on nothing very much in particular, in which O'Connor offers us his opinions on James Joyce (God, isn't he obscure and pretentious, eh?), taxi drivers (don't they talk a lot of nonsense, eh?), (turning thirty (God, you feel old, don't you, eh?) and so on, for nearly two hundred and fifty flatulent pages. You begin to wonder how anybody can write this unimaginatively and still look at himself in the mirror every morning. O'Connor is not helped by his delusion that he doesn't have a tin ear - he never misses an opportunity to poke rib-tickling fun at People With Amusing Accents, but unfortunately he doesn't so much register the way people actually speak as the way he likes to think they speak (like one of those people whose idea of impersonating Sean Connery is simply to pronounce all the s's as "sh".) There's a sort of creepily ingratiating quality to O'Connor's prose, as though he's forever striving to seem ordinary, one-of-us, somebody whose thoughts remain untroubled by strangeness, idiosyncrasy or indeed originality. This frozen smirk gets on the nerves extremely quickly - perhaps O'Connor's need to seem like a regular guy is prompted by a fear of displaying any sort of kinship with his markedly more eccentric sister Sinead (yes, that Sinead.) But the effort seems forced; surely nobody can be this uninteresting all the way down. The jokes are the commonest of currency, the insights don't go any further in than the epidermis, the style (a favourite qualifying phrase is "but, hey-") is gratingly chatty; the whole is so glazed and vacuous that this book can cause severe property damage from being flung across rooms. A great present for anybody who doesn't care about good writing but has a wobbly kitchen table.
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