How the Irish Saved Civilization.

"And that," Mr. Cahill concludes with typically wry unabashedness, "is how the Irish saved civilization."

It was likely influenced by Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization and the result of a marketing strategy.

(Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization provides a pleasant exception.)

The book's title, "How the Irish Saved Civilization," is an impish and scholarly enough claim to put some strut back into Friday's tired parade.

As readers of "How the Irish Saved Civilization" will recall, Mr. Cahill is fond of hyperbole.

How the Irish Saved Civilization was first published in March 1995 and appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List for almost two years.

To the Editor: Peter Finn writes engagingly about Thomas Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization" (Aug. 13).

One of Bill and Chelsea's favorite books was Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization, which Bill gave to friends and colleagues.

Thomas Cahill, in his 1995 book How the Irish Saved Civilization, credited Irish Monks with having "saved" Western Civilization during this period.

For the past 28 weeks, a whimsically titled book about fifth-century Irish monks, "How the Irish Saved Civilization," by Thomas Cahill, has been on the paperback best-seller list.

"How the Irish Saved Civilization" begins with a mission: to correct the standard history of European civilization, which, Mr. Cahill says, has unfairly portrayed the Irish as wild, not civilized.

This issue will at once be seen to lack the verve of those brought up in Mr. Cahill's previous books, "How the Irish Saved Civilization" and "The Gifts of the Jews."

How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (1995)

Mr. Cahill, the author of the surprise best seller "How the Irish Saved Civilization," has for the last two years led a small prayer group in midtown called the Friends of St. Giles.

HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION, by Thomas Cahill.

An Irish-American whose book "How the Irish Saved Civilization" catapulted him from obscurity to The New York Times best-seller list, Cahill said even the traditional corned beef is a crock: "Ireland was too poor for beef.

Mr. Cahill is the author of "How the Irish Saved Civilization" (Doubleday), a well-received account of how the monks of a newly Christianized Ireland preserved Europe's classical heritage during the centuries when barbarian tribes were overrunning the continent.

Quoting everyone from Evelyn Waugh to Bob Dylan, Thomas Cahill, the author of "How the Irish Saved Civilization," turns his sights on the Jews - "this oddball tribe, this raggle-taggle band, this race of wanderers who are the progenitors of the Western world."

So writes Thomas Cahill in his captivating new book, "The Gifts of the Jews," a sequel to the author's best-selling "How the Irish Saved Civilization" and the second book in his projected seven-volume "Hinges of History" series, about "the great gift-givers" who shaped Western civilization.

It's not quite the musical analogue to Thomas Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization," the best-selling book blending Irish history, folklore and myth making that argues that Western culture would not have survived without the Irish monks who saved and spread the works of antiquity.

Cahill, the author of the chatty and popular "How the Irish Saved Civilization," shows how John matured in Bulgaria and Istanbul, where, surrounded first by the Eastern Orthodox and then by Muslims, he learned the toleration and theological curiosity that would inform Vatican II.

Once you've told them how much you enjoyed "How the Irish Saved Civilization," they'll be at your front doorstep with "How the Scots Invented the Modern World," "The Gifts of the Jews," and perhaps one day "How the Norwegians Invented Hip-Hop."