Much Irish history is written as a matter of heroes and leaders, of great personalities and sweeping events. T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin"s collection of essays by leading historians offers all those things, but it takes the land itself as its starting point. Ireland, they write, has always been poor because of its ungiving soil; always isolated because of its ring of imposing mountains and steep hills--but always open to invasion from the east across the calm, narrow Irish Sea, because of which, they write, "our present-day laws and institutions have their origins in England." While taking a long view of events, they manage to compress thousands of years of history into this fact-filled, highly readable book.