"I was the sixth of seven children. My mother cordially disliked my father; I wonder how many they might have had if she'd liked him. I arrived with my mother's lunch on 7 September 1929 the crash was heard around the world ! "

A book about an extraordinary Irish life, the quintessential shabby-gentile Dublin childhood, the stories of growing up and of girls and more girls! Vincent Dowling is a flamboyant lover of life-his life has been an amazing one where he has mixed with stars and politicians and always managed to do his own thing. These pages are filled with life and energy and will be enjoyed by anyone who loves life and the theatre.

For the past five decades, Vincent Dowling has been a key figure at the centre of Irish, British, and American theatre as an actor, producer, director, and artistic director.

He is best known for his two spells spent as artistic director of Dublin's world famous Abbey Theatre. The intense politics of the Theatre are exposed and the joy of bringing successful productions to the West End and Broadway is ably demonstrated in his lively prose. His key achievement while at the Abbey was the re-establishment of bringing successful plays like The Plough and the Stars and Shadow of a Gunman to Broadway, the West End, Moscow, Paris, and Florence.

Biography • 6" x 9 1/4" • 368 pages b&w photos
ISBN 0-86327-828-0

He began in British theatre in the early 1950s and A Theatrical Life is peppered with anecdotes about his time spent touring the country, playing the lofty heights of the West End or Stratford one night and Kidderminster the next. His views on the various towns and cities visited have not been softened by the intervening years! (Bradford is described as "the grimmest town we had seen.")

He became enamoured with American theatre in the 1980s and moved to the U.S. and among other roles served as artistic and producing director of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival for nine years. In this role he is credited with giving Tom Hanks his big break by inviting him to take the lead in The Taming of the Shrew in 1977 and since then has acted as a mentor to the double Oscar-winning actor. Vincent won an Emmy for his television production of The Playboy of the Western World and has staged his one-man show in New York, Chicago, and on three occasions at the White House.

Dowling spares no blushes in his recounting of the shenanigans, partying, and bed-hopping that went on during his time in theatre.

Vincent Dowling was born in 1929 in Dublin and has been involved in every aspect of theatre on an international level. He currently lives in North Chester, Massachusetts, where he founded and runs The Miniature Theatre of Chester. He has won several international awards for his services to theatre and is currently an active member of the International Artistic Directorate of the rebuilt Globe Theatre in London.

Wayfarers in Medicine
This hard cover specialist history book on medicine from 1947 has 284 pages as well as a comprehensive Index. Some of the interesting chapters include:

• The oldest physician
• The oldest textbook
• Graeculi Esurientes
• Medicine and the Trade Routes
• A Medieval Surgeon and his Book
• Leonardo, the Forerunner
• In the Days of Vesalius
• The Anatomist in Art
• A Patient of the Renaissance
• Montaigne
• "Honest Little Harvey"
• Descartes, the Linx
• "Plain Parson Hales"
• Some old Journeymen Surgeons
• Some Antique Stones
• The Evolution of Surgery
• Early Edinburgh Surgeons
• A surgeon of France
• The Resurrection Men
• Wayfarers in Canada
• Laennec
• Claude Bernard
• Lister
• Osler
• Gorgas
• Sir Robert Jones
• Pathfinders in Dublin
• Envoi: And the Future?

Published by William Heinemann Medical Books Ltd, London 1947

Printed by Cahill & Co Ltd, Dublin