Dáire Keogh's full-length study of the driving force behind the Christian Brothers began, he says, “in response to a commission from the Christian Brothers” (9). This admission introducing a thorough and thoughtful study of its topic highlights the author's care throughout.

Keogh establishes that Rice's life-defining work grew out of a social and intellectual world far more nuanced than is often appreciated.

To understand Rice and the Christian Brothers' first decades, one has to understand, Keogh argues, that their responses to challenges were guided not simply by politics or by faith but by a combination of the two. For example, as the British government established educational standards designed to apply to all Irish schoolchildren, and then, with Cardinal Newman's encouragement, created the National University of Ireland, the Christian Brothers opposed many of these moves as tending to secularize Ireland. Opposition from Irish nationalists on the grounds that these proposals anglicized Ireland created an initially uncomfortable alliance that ultimately flourished in the Brothers' profession of “Faith and Fatherland” (252). “In the long term the[ir] schools were perceived as seminaries of sedition . . . more immediately . . . they . . . advanced a meritocracy” (253) that Keogh demonstrates undermined one ascendancy even as it created another.

Keogh's fine study shows just how influential a role Rice himself played in the creation of the Christian Brothers and the reshaping of Ireland.