Foster (Modern Ireland, 1600-1972) takes in the sweep of contemporary Irish popular culture, music, literature and politics in this short personal book, originally delivered as a lecture series in Belfast in 2004. With notes and some of the usual scholarly paraphernalia, the book is also uncommonly well written. It's the rare Oxford don (a scholar of Yeats, no less) who dares to take on the Pogues, the singer Mary Black, Coim Toibin and the Boomtown Rats.  (IRE237, $30.00)