As the title suggests, this book is a history of the evolution of the events we've come to call Burns Nights. Author Clark McGinn doesn't exactly try to tell you how to hold your own Burns Supper, but you'll probably get a good idea about how to do that from reading this book, too.
The point is, Burns Suppers have spread around the globe, and they're more popular now than they've ever been -- among all different kinds of people, too. McGinn offers a nice factoid in the introduction: in 2009 (the 250th anniversary of Burns' birth)
"around nine million people (about one and a half times the population of Scotland) participated in Burns Suppers."
McGinn has ideas about why these convivial parties have grown so popular, and that has a lot to do with Burns himself and the values he expressed in his poetry, as well as the way he lived his life.
The history and spread of Burns Suppers has a lot to with the club culture that existed immediately following the death of Robert Burns. What's more, as McGinn and others have pointed out, the subsequent popularity of Burns Suppers also relates the Scottish diaspora that rippled out across the world in the 19th century. A Burns Supper turned out to be a perfect way to pay tribute to the values and culture of Scotland.
A further point is made about how, as one member of a Robert Burns Club in London put it over 100 years ago, "a time of national crisis is the very time to turn to poetry."
287 page paperback.
