Judging Shaw

Judging

by Fintan O'Toole

GBS was the first great brand – discover how he created this most modern of concepts.

The fourth book in the Royal Irish Academy's award-winning 'Judging' series looks at the legacy of George Bernard Shaw, Nobel prizewinner for literature.

George Bernard Shaw has left a vast legacy of theatrical, fictional, polemical, critical and philosophical writing. The first person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award, Shaw bridges the Victorian era and the contemporary culture of celebrity. The GBS brand came to be recognised globally as referring to an Irish provocateur with a red beard and startling opinions. He was a master of self-invention, a nobody who captured the zeitgeist and one of the first private individuals to understand fully how to generate—and how to use—global fame.

The timing of Judging Shaw is fortuitous, as it will serve to reintroduce GBS to an Irish and international readership. The book is an interesting, informative, and well-written survey of Shaw/GBS and will be a welcome addition to the library of those who know Bernard Shaw perhaps only as the author of Pygmalion, his most popular and frequently performed play.

Genres: Biography

380 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Fintan O'Toole is a columnist, assistant editor and drama critic for The Irish Times. O'Toole was born in Dublin and was partly educated at University College Dublin. He has written for the Irish Times since 1988 and was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001. He is a literary critic, historical writer and political commentator, with generally left-wing views. He was and continues to be a strong critic of corruption in Irish politics, in both the Haughey era and continuing to the present.

O'Toole has criticised what he sees as negative attitudes towards immigration in Ireland, the state of Ireland's public services, growing inequality during Ireland's economic boom, the Iraq War and the American military's use of Shannon Airport, among many other issues. In 2006, he spent six months in China reporting for The Irish Times. In his weekly columns in The Irish Times, O'Toole opposed the IRA's campaign during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fintan_O...

Reviews

[T P Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this. However, it's very much an idiosyncratic overview of GBS and themes in his work that appeal to the author. I didn't agree with his analysis of many of these but his writing is provocative and relies on Shaw's own writing. The illustrations and the lay out of the volume is excellent. A really good book to pick up from time to time but needs to read in the context of a more extensive biographical account (such as the Holyrood biography).

[Fionnbharr Rodgers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Readers of The Irish Times will be familiar with O’Toole’s writing, and it’s worth considering that this is a journalist’s approach as opposed to a historian’s or a literary critic’s. Doesn’t quite have the methodology of Foster’s tomes on Yeats, or Edna Longley’s critiques of MacNeice; but it’s a pretty good overview, some interesting points made, and above all O’Toole’s passion carries you through the work. Worth having on your shelf, and in your general bibliography.