TWO REVIEWS : 
 1. THE SHORT VERSION 
 For all Joyce fans this is a MUST READ. 
 2. THE LONG VERSION 
 In 1915 James Joyce was 33, unemployed, as poor as he'd ever been, with a wife and 2 young kids, living in Trieste, a few miles from where bombs were exploding and soldiers dying in thousands. His only book, Dubliners, had sold 412 copies since it was finally published in June 1914. (It had taken 10 years to get published). No one would touch his novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a twenty foot pole. 
 So, then, the perfect time and setting to begin Ulysses! 
 It took 8 years and became a dreadful pain in the arse for everybody. Two radical literary magazines, both run by women, one in America (The Little Review) and one in London (The Egoist) decided to try to serialise it. The chapters emerged and got ever weirder and more obscene. After receiving the "Sirens" episode, Harriet Weaver, editor of the Egoist, wrote to him : 
 I think I can see that your writing has been affected to some extent by your worries. 
 Ezra Pound put it another way and asked Joyce if he had "got knocked on the head or bit by a wild dog and gone dotty". 
 In America the government finally prosecuted when the Nausicaa chapter was published. They didn't like Gerty MacDowell's underthings, at all. In the courtroom : 
 The DA launched into a red-faced invective, at which point Quinn [for the defense] broke in and pointed to the prosecutor : "This is my best exhibit! There is proof Ulysses does not corrupt or fill people full of lascivious thoughts. Look at him! Does a reading of that chapter want to send him into the arms of a whore? Is he filled with sexual desire? Not at all. He wants to murder somebody! He wants to send Joyce to jail. He wants to send those two women to jail. He would like to disbar me. He is full of hatred, venom, anger and uncharitableness. But lust? There is not a drop of lust or an ounce of sex passion in his whole body... He is my chief exhibit as to the effect of Ulysses." 
 Sylvia Beach, who ran Shakespeare and Co, a bookshop in Paris, 
 (it's still there! I have been...) 
 decided to bite the bullet and publish Ulysses in 1922. When she did, it turned out that everyone was gagging for a copy, but they all lived in Britain or America where it was banned. It immediately became the supreme symbol of cultural rebellion. To have a copy, or even, to know someone who had a copy! O the thrill! So they had to smuggle their copies from France, and the smuggling takes up a fair chunk of the tale. Ulysses sold 24,000 copies in the following nine years, which was pitifully small. The Great Gatsby sold the same number in its first year & this was considered a major disappointment. 
 So for ten years they couldn't get Ulysses published in the USA because this vice supremo John Sumner would have vamoosed them off to Sing Sing. Into the gap stepped shady guys printing up pirated copies, and obviously paying Joyce nothing (just like music bootleggers later). They had to be stopped - and the only sure way of doing that was for Mr Quinn, the defender of Ulysses, to ask Mr Sumter to prosecute the pirates for distributing obscene books! Which situation he described as "somewhat ironical". 
 The government didn't want the botheration of a full trial, so what they did was confiscate every imported copy. In December 1922 they had collected nearly 500 copies at New York's General Post Office Building on 34th Street, and : 
 They wheeled them down the basement's dim corridors and unloaded them in the furnace room. ... The men opened the round cast-iron hatches and began tossing James Joyce's Ulysses into the chambers. Paper burns brighter than coal. 
 For this very delicious book Kevin Birmingham got hold of a great subject, which we might have thought we already knew about but we really didn't , not to this degree of essential detail. And just when the reader is thinking that this quaint old cultural war, long since won hands down, (is anything now considered to be obscene?) is a type of comedy, he switches the focus to Joyce's own life, which was painful - literally. We have pages of Joyce's horrible eye ailments, the grotesque eye operations, lists of treatments, all of which failed - 
 Steam baths 
 Mud baths 
 Sweating powders 
 Cold compresses and hot compresses 
 Iodine injections 
 Stimulation of the thyroid 
 Electrotherapy 
 Leeches applied to eyes (many times) 
 Dionine (eyedrops) 
 Salicylic acid (eyedrops) 
 Boric acid (eyedrops) 
 Atropine (eyedrops) 
 Scopolamine (eyedrops) 
 And of course 
 Iridectomies (multiple times) 
 He had decades of on-off painful eruptions of his eye problems, which KB attributes to tertiary syphilis, contracted way back when Joyce was a student in Dublin. However, thankfully, it wasn't all misery. After Ulysses he began the inscrutable Finnegans Wake, of which Nora Barnacle said: 
 "I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own writing." She would get out of bed and pound on the door, "Now Jim, stop writing or stop laughing!" 
 (All Joyce's friends hated Finnegan, but he carried on with it for 17 years & finished it & died.) 
 When the formal case against Ulysses was heard in November 1933 it was a very rum affair. The prosecutor, the defender and the judge all agreed that Ulysses was a masterpiece of the highest order. No witnesses were called. Judge John Woolsey made the decision all on his own. Time magazine, that champion of the avant-garde, apostrophized thus : 
 Watchers of the US skies last week reported no comet or other celestial portent. In Manhattan no showers of ticker-tape blossomed from Broadway office windows, no welcoming committee packed City Hall... Yet many a wide-awake modern-minded citizen knew he had seen literary history pass another milestone. For last week a much enduring traveler, world-famed but long an outcast, landed safe and sound on US shores. His name was Ulysses. 
 It fair brings a tear to the eye. Except that the same journal was probably calling for Joyce's head on a plate ten years before. Well, the tide had turned. 
 Let's finish with a remarkable fact. Can I believe it? Well, I'm going to try. On p 340 KB informs us: 
 After ninety years in print, Ulysses sells roughly one hundred thousand copies a year. 
 I raise a glass to all of you yearly 100,000. May every one of you make it through to Molly's final yes.