Canaries have been domesticated since the fifteenth century, when the Spanish first imported them from their Canary Isles home, attracted by their melodic song. Since then their popularity as a caged bird has spread throughout the world. This book introduces several of the different types of canary that are popular.
Brian Keenan went to Beirut in 1985 for a change of scene from his native Belfast. He became headline news when he was kidnapped by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen and held in the suburbs of Beirut for the next four and a half years.
an ordinary boy who would go on to become world-famous as a hostage in Beirut and author of the extraordinary testimony of imprisonment and survival that was An Evil Cradling. a boy puzzled by religion and sectarianism, in love with books and music and full of curiosity about the world outside.
During their four year incarceration in a Lebanese cell the authors envisaged walking in the High Andes and across Patagonia. Five years after their release Keenan and McCarthy travelled to Chile to fulfil this dream. The story of their journey revisited the past experiences whilst allowing them to live by their own rules.
The man held hostage by fundamentalist Sh'ite militiamen in the suburbs of Beirut was visited and sustained by the presence of Turlough O'Carolan during captivity. Now he tells O'Carolan's story, rich with the textures and smells of rural Ireland and peopled by a house of angels and devils. Turlough is narrated largely by the legendary blind Irish harper from his death bed, and through the recollections of those closest to him. It powerfully evokes a lost Ireland of famine and disease, eviction and oppression. O'Carolan's Rabelaisian desire for drink and women is counterpointed by his artistic struggle towards the great music and some kind of inner peace. Driven by demons and dreams, riven by contradictions, Turlough emerges as a great man, full of a blind man afraid of the dark. The book is a remarkable historical journey, and a huge imaginative feat.