Review
Sean McMahon is engrossed by this portrait of the one-time Derry resident who wiped out tuberculosis in Ireland.
- Noél Browne – Passionate Outsider
- Gill & Macmillan
Lopsided Life
Those whom the gods would mock; give them early fame.
There probably isn’t a Greek proverb that asserts this but there should be. Ask anyone over sixty about David Horgan’s subject and they will say, ‘Mother and Child Scheme’ and mutter about the campaigns of Archbishop McQuaid and the Irish Medical Association, and the dereliction of Seán MacBride. In fact Browne’s real claim to fame was the scheme that eventually led to the eradication of tuberculosis in Ireland. Yet both these events were over by the time he was thirty-six and there was, what may have seemed to many, forty-six years of leftover life to kill.
That life was full of disappointments and refusals to compromise but never for a single aching moment lacked courage. It has been painted in broad dramatic strokes by its subject in a memorable autobiography with the understated title Against the Tide (1986) and it was Horgan’s task to set in order the prosaic details that its Sturm und Drang had not much interest in and to correct errors of fact. Together they make a memorable contribution to our twentieth-century history. This book is the first paperback edition of Horgan’s millennial biography and it is as readable as it is vital to our understanding of a time when the Church assumed a power that it no longer wants. There are sixteen pages of photographs and a typically superb index by the peerless Helen Litton.
