Review of Selfless in Irish Times

July 2021

Geoff's latest book, the autobiographical 'Selfless: Journeys through Identity and Social Class' has attracted an excellent review in the Irish Times.

‘Reading Dostoevsky and Turgenev in Russian on a small cards table for a desk, in a house with damp walls, as sounds of bombs and bullets fill the air nearby, could be an image conjured by film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. In fact it’s Beattie’s formative years in north Belfast as the Troubles ignited, and one of the memorable scenes on his journey from a working-class upbringing to a new milieu in education, through grammar school, Birmingham, Cambridge, and a professorship in psychology. Beattie’s memoirs are lively, funny, with little sugar coating, and he proves a likeable yet self-assured voice outlining his pathway into his calling. He considers his background and family within his field of expertise, and in turn has the reader thinking of their own.’