We'll Take A cup of Kindness Yet: A Book For Our Times

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Born into a small farming Protestant Orange Order family in East Donegal, Ireland, John Throne became a socialist, an internationalist and an atheist. In this book he weaves together his family, personal and political lives and attempts to explain how the collective power and collective brain of working people can end capitalism, and build a new world.

Through it all, the whiff of the Irish countryside never leaves him.
Capitalism is on its sick bed - in the night the Banshee wails.

Contents:

FOREWORD The Thing Is This

PART 1 Against The Grain

• Digging a Hole for a Short-Legged Bull
• Portinure - On the Finn’s West Bank
• My Male Privileges
• Divide and Rule and the Siege Mentality
• Conflicts and Calluses
• The Drink – To Drown or Not to Drown the Sorrows
• The Sex – Never a Cappella
• A Scythe’s Blade
• A Mine – A Lumber Camp – New York City
• To Sea
• Vietnam
• Home Again - Declassed

PART 2 Opportunities Missed

• The North Implodes
• My Bearings
• Backlash
• The Bogside Uprising
• Labour Abdicates – Repression – Sectarianism – Gain The Upper Hand
• Climbing a Cliff Face

PART 3 What They Never Tell Us

• Capitalism: What It Is and How It Works
• Materialism: Historical Materialism – Dialectical Materialism – Dialectics (Don’t Panic. They Are ‘Only’ Words)
• Ireland and the Theory of the Permanent (or Uninterrupted) Revolution
• The Collective Power: The Collective Brain of the Working Class (How a Socialist Revolution Can Come About – How a Socialist Society Would Work)

PART 4 The Grindstone

• The Leaving – This Time For Good
• Dublin
• A Strategy
• On the Building Sites
• Expanding: Strengths – Weaknesses – Pressures – A Full-Time Revolutionary
• My System Presents Its Bill
• Working Class North and South – Efforts To Rise
• A Small Nucleus

PART 5 Defeats Unshackle My Thinking

• The Committee For A Workers’ International (CWI)
• Travels
• Illness Again
• Wrong Methods-  Mistakes Of My Own
• US Capitalism – Guns Or Butter
• US Working Class
• Another Small Nucleus
• The Wrecking Of The CWI
• Expelled – A Badge Of Honour
• Democratic Centralism – Cover For A Multitude of Sins
• Labour’s Militant Voice

PART 6 A Sense of History - A Sense Of Proportion - A Sense Of Humour –Tools Of A Revolutionary

• My Moving ‘Career’
• A Night Out In Chicago
• An Alternative Irish Night
• Mother’s And Aunt’s Deaths
• Bonnie
• Cook County Hospital – My Second Home
• The Donegal Woman

AFTERWORD

• The Struggle Against Capitalism Is The Struggle For The Consciousness Of The Working Class.
• A Life Unengaged In This Struggle is An Incomplete Life

The Donegal Woman, John Throne's first book that was a best seller in Ireland. It can also be purchased at: Books.ie

“…A compelling book, thanks to its powerful subject matter and Throne’s gift for storytelling. A social history, but much more, it is a powerful story of a victim who gradually overcomes misfortune and finds happiness and independence. Indeed, this book forces one to reassess what good literature is… I am not sure which category of English literature in Ireland will accommodate it—but whatever its genre, it deserves a place on everyone’s shelves.”
—Eilis Ni Dhuibne, The Irish Times

“This story of Irish peasant life is reminiscent of Patrick McGill, Peadar O’Donnell, and Liam O’Flaherty, in its tone, emotional power, and historical validity. But John Throne also has as insight into how women think and feel that is very rare among male writers of any nationality, let alone the Irish. This is his first novel and is based on the life of his grandmother. But to describe it as a family memoir is to grossly understate Throne’s artistic achievement in recreating the brutal world of the Donegal hiring system through the eyes and complex emotions of a young girl. It is all the more remarkable given that he never knew his grandmother and had to glean the facts of her brief life from his mother.”
—Padraig Yeates, The Independent

More reviews here