That's That (A Memoir) By Colin Broderick

(Broadway Paperbacks, 2013) 

There aren’t many authors that can make you both laugh and shout in anger while guiding you through the troubled and often deadly fields of tribulation in the Rebel countryside of Tyrone, while teaching you about the different types of rain that you may encounter while cutting turf on an Irish mountainside.

Told with wit and depth, this tragic-comic coming of age story is one that you won’t be able to put down, reading from cover to cover about the inner strength of one Irishman, caught up in the Troubles of 1980’s East Tyrone.

The best Irish book I’ve come across since Larry Kirwan’s “Green Suede Shoes”, one of favorite segments must be the author’s anecdote of his conflict turned friendship with the feared Donnelly-Arthurs clan, the very same men of whom would later be renowned as The Loughgall Martyrs, and as the author says himself; “They were dignified soldiers….Then in the clean white of the past I could see the faces of the two young boys I had first wrestled with in Kelly’s Inn not two years before, boys I had fought and drank and laughed with and whose families I had come to know and love : twenty-one-year-old Declan Arthurs and nineteen-year-old Seamus Donnelly were dead.”

 Sometimes tragic, sometimes poignant, but just as often high-spirited, “That’s That” is literary gold and a must read not just because it’s one of the first books to come out of the Rebel country of Tyrone with the ability to bring forth laughter and perhaps sadness and anger, but because Colin Broderick is a postmodern Seanchai with brilliant insight on the North of Ireland today.  Colin Broderick, is the realie dealie.

                         -- Rory Dubhdara, Radio Rebel Gael