Beyond Belfast [Hardcover]

Will Ferguson (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Viking; First Edition edition (2009)
• ISBN-10: 0670069159
• ISBN-13: 978-0670069156
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,111,776 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First rate and entertaining, June 1, 2010

By 

Anime Domo "Anime Domo" (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond Belfast (Hardcover)

Some years back, on the cusp of the current Peace Accords, Mr Ferguson took on the long hike of the Ulster Way, a weeks-long walk around the perimeter of modern-day Northern Ireland, tackling both the difficult physical journey and the very difficult subjects of Irish history and society, ancient and modern. This book is a very well written account of all of that, expressed with considerable compassion, insight, and humour. Anyone interested in hiking or in Ireland will enjoy this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written and very enjoyable, September 11, 2010

By 

C. J. Thompson "Arctic John" (Pond Inlet, Nunavut Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beyond Belfast (Hardcover)

About a quarter of the way into this book I began to compose a review that ended with the sentiment that I would be unlikely to read this again. My first impressions were not overly negative; I just didn't find much that excited my interest to any great degree. Mostly, I found myself comparing this author to Bill Bryson, one of my favorite travel yarn writers. This is, after all, the sort of book you can well imagine Bryson writing, except that whereas with Bryson I might get belly-laughs, here I just got the odd chuckle once in a while.

The comparison, of course, is not a very fair one and at about the half-way mark into the book I found that I had become gripped by the narrative in spite of my first impressions. Ferguson is quite skilled as a 'visual' writer, but his low-key delivery makes that fact easy to miss at first. What seems like a very light-hearted romp of a book actually covers some very serious stuff and the lightness is often counter-balanced by a real darkness in subject and tone. Particularly moving is the passage where the author attends the public inquest into the infamous bombing in Omagh.

All in all this is a good 'wee' book (as they might have it in Ulster). I will read it again sometime.