Book excerpt: For nearly thirty years, Kevin C. Kearns collected the memories and recollections of Dubliners on tape. These interviews have formed the basis of an extraordinary body of work, one whose subjects have included the life of the Dublin pub and the tenement house. In this ambitious book, he considers their contributions in aggregate, drawing on the voices of ordinary Dubliners to build an oral folk history of the city in the twentieth century. Firemen, engine drivers, bell ringers, gatekeepers, cinema ushers, gravediggers, dockers, factory workers, butchers, hatters, booksellers and many more: all contribute their own words to this epic portrait of Dublin city life in the turbulent decades separating the Victorian and modern eras. In Dublin Voices, the words of ordinary Dubliners can be heard as they recall their lives and times. Lucid, witty and compelling, these oral narratives bring the city to life in a manner that conventional histories simply cannot match.