I'm so glad I bought this book second hand for very, very little as I'm afraid it's not going to make it to my keeper shelf.
I was intrigued by the title - sadly, that was the best bit. At just over 200 pages, it's a short work so taking about 70 pages to actually make it to Ireland from the ruins of Rome, another 30 for Patrick to put in an appearance and the next couple of chapters to get the island converted to Christianity and the written word (wading through all those Irish epics as we went) didn't leave much time to show exactly how the Irish actually managed to save civilisation (page 145 before the author got around to telling us and even then devoted exactly one chapter to the process before: bam! the conclusion). Spoiler alert: if you don't want to have to wade through the preliminary chapters, skip to chapter 6 of 7 to find out that those clever Irish basically copied everything they could lay their hands on before the Goths, Visigoths and even Vandals could barbecue it. Better still, just read the spoiler alert - it'll save you a lot of time.
Mr Cahill is obviously greatly impressed by the pre-Patrician Irish, their culture and legends and, if this had been his aim, the book would be a start but this work by no means fulfils the claims of the title. There was no detailed study of the collection of the classical works by the Irish monks - how did they choose what to copy; how did they go about collating and collecting; what were their copying methods - a small treatise on the manuscripts, their decoration and illumination - even how they were bound - would not have gone amiss. There could have been soooo much more to this book than there was. Sorry, but I can't recommend it as a scholarly work of any great depth and it left me feeling very disappointed.
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