Donald Harman Akenson Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Cornell University Press, 573 pages, $35
Donald Harman Akenson, editor Conor Cruise O’Brien Anthology.
Cornell University Press, 356 pages, $39.95
reviewed by Mark Falcoff
Conor Cruise O’Brien is one of the most extraordinary personalities of the late twentieth century. Born in Ireland in 1917, he has been successively a civil servant, diplomat, U.N. official, academic administrator, member of the Irish parliament, Irish minister for posts and telegraphs, journalist, and author of a half-dozen first-rate books and several hundred articles, ranging from literary criticism to political philosophy and international affairs. Though well-grounded in Irish history and culture (unlike most of his countrymen, he is fully fluent in Gaelic), O’Brien has lived and worked in France, Britain, America, and Africa, and is a veteran of politics and the culture wars in each.
By the time O’Brien burst upon the American intellectual scene in the early 1960s he already had behind him a fairly extensive career in the Irish civil service and at the United Nations, and was widely known (under the literary pseudonym Donat O’Donnell) as a learned and intelligent critic of François Mauriac, Paul Claudel, and Evelyn Waugh. He came to New York via Ghana, where as vice chancellor of the University of Ghana he had somewhat naïvely tried to reconcile Western academic standards with the more sinister political agenda of dictator Kwame Nkrumah. After several years he returned to Ireland to enter parliament as a
