"This is a fascinating account of the massive cultural, political, and economic changes that have taken place in Ireland in the past 40 years, and something of a coda to Foster’s monumental volume, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972. Foster is the most influential Irish historian around and his two-volume biography of W.B. Yeats has reinvigorated scholarship on the great modernist poet. In Luck and the Irish, Foster examines the rise  and fall of the 'Celtic Tiger'—Ireland’s 'economic miracle' at the end of the twentieth century—, changing social norms in Ireland and the reduced hegemony of the Catholic church, and the astonishing success and range of contemporary Irish cultural productions."

Recommended by Eric Falci, Associate Professor of English and author of Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966-2010