"The Sunday Business Post 14/10/2007 Reviewed by Emmanuel Kehoe "Ferriter's thoughtful and timely new work is unique in that it reproduces in wonderful detail large numbers of original documents...sight of original documents is usually denied to the hobby historian and the quality of the reproduction, complete with all the originals, errors and corrections, is so good one can almost feel the bite of the typewriter on the paper and smell the dried ink." The Sunday Tribune 14/10/2007 Reviewed by Kevin Rafter "Judging Dev is a resounding success for both the author and his publisher, the Royal Irish Academy. The book is wonderfully produced with its text inter-spread by photographs and illustrations, many of which will be new to even the strongest readers of Irish history." The Sunday Independent 21/10/2007 Reviewed by John A Murphy "The book's great and original source is the deValera archive in UCD, which was not freely available to earlier scholars. Is supplies the marvellously illustrated material at the heart of this publication - longhand and typewritten letters and documents which give a striking sense of historical immediacy, and beautifully reproduced photographs never seen before, freshly touching on every phase of Dev's career and concisely contexted by the author. All this stuff alone is worth much more than the (very reasonable) publication price of Euro 30. The photos and documents take up approximately 250 out of the book's 370 pages so that the text is relatively brief. It is a sustained analytical essay on de Valera's career, richly drawling from the UCD archive but also taking into account the judgements of past and present de Valera scholars and commentators. Overall Ferriter's assessments are superbly fresh, independent and sophisticated."

Eamon de Valera has often been characterised as a stern, un-bending, devious and divisive Irish politician. But how valid is this caricature? In "Judging Dev", Diarmaid Ferriter re-examines de Valera's life and legacy. It contains an in-depth analysis of the impact of de Valera and includes many previously unpublished key letters, documents and photographs from the National Archives of Ireland and the UCD Archives to chronicle the extraordinary career of the most significant politician of modern Irish history and his role in the history of the Irish state.