Blasket Memories
Author: Pádraig Tyers
Publisher: Mercier Press Ltd
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn account of life on the Blasket Island and on the island's eventual demise.
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The Blasket Islandman
Author: Gerald Hayes
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Published: 2018-05-04
Total Pages: 387
ISBN-13: 1788410394
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTomás Ó Criomhthain (1856–1937) is one of the giants of Irish-language literature. His best-known books, Allagar na hInise and An tOileánach, are acknowledged classics. But he was a highly unlikely author. He lived his entire life on the isolated and now-abandoned Great Blasket, in a house he built with his own hands using stones he found on the island. Likewise, he crafted a valuable literary heritage out of island life. With indefatigable persistence, he steadily built on his modest formal education, learning to read and write in Irish during middle age while simultaneously expanding his knowledge of literature and history. Scholarly visitors were impressed with Tomás's observations of his tiny community. They encouraged him to commit his stories and memories to paper. He wrote three first-person accounts of his experiences, bequeathing to us a captivating saga of a folk culture doomed by difficult circumstances. His works are among the first examples of Ireland's transition from oral to written folk storytelling. The Blasket Islandman tells, for the first time, the full story of Tomás's life, with its many triumphs and travails. This absorbing account also describes the forces that influenced his work and details his impressive legacy. Tomás was determined that his community be remembered. In the process, he achieved a level of immortality for himself. More than eighty years after his passing, he remains the famed 'Blasket Islandman' and, to paraphrase the man himself, the like of him will never be again.
From the Great Blasket to America
Author: Michael Carney
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Published: 2013-04-05
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 1848891148
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMike Carney was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1920 in that unique, isolated Irish-speaking community. Mike left in 1937 to seek a better future in Dublin and eventually settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, with other former islanders. The death on the island of his younger brother set off a chain of events that led to its evacuation, in which Mike played a pivotal role. This is the story of his life and his efforts to promote Irish culture in America, to preserve the memory of The Great Blasket, to respect roots left behind and to set down roots in a new land. Written as Mike approached the age of 93, this memoir is probably the last of a long line of books written by Blasket Islanders. * Similar to: An Irish Navvy - the Diary of an Exile and The Hard Road to Klondike
The Last Blasket King
Author: Gerald Hayes
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Published: 2015-04-20
Total Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 1848898878
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe last King of the Great Blasket Island was Pádraig Ó Catháin, known as Peats Mhicí, who served for quarter of a century until his death in 1929. The King helped the islanders navigate through life and through national as well as international events, such as the 1916 Rising and the Great War. This book tells how he came to be King of the Great Blasket Island and how his personality and integrity shaped the role. This is the first account of the King's extraordinary life, written in collaboration with his descendants in the USA and Ireland. It tells the story of this unique man, his many contributions to the island and his extended legacy. • Also available: From the Great Blasket to America by Michael Carney and The Loneliest Boy in the World by Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin
Peig
Author: Peig Sayers
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 1974-10-01
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9780815602583
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA reprint of the Syracuse University Press edition of 1974.
The Islandman
Author: Irene Lucchitti
Publisher: Peter Lang
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9783039118373
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book concerns Tomás O'Crohan of the Blasket Islands and offers a radical reinterpretation of this iconic Irish figure and his place in Gaelic literature. It examines the politics of Irish culture that turned O'Crohan into «The Islandman» and harnessed his texts to the national political project, presenting him as an instinctual, natural hero and a naïve, almost unwilling writer, and his texts as artefacts of unselfconscious, unmediated linguistic and ethnographic authenticity. The author demonstrates that such misleading claims, never properly scrutinised before this study, have been to the detriment of the author's literary reputation and that they have obscured the deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic purpose and nature of his writing. At the core of the book is a recognition that what O'Crohan wrote was not primarily a history, nor an ethnography, but an autobiography. The book demonstrates that the conventional reading of the texts, which privileges O'Crohan's fisherman identity, has hidden from view the writer protagonist inscribed in the texts, subordinating his identity as a writer to his identity as a peasant. The author shows O'Crohan to have been a literary pioneer who negotiated the journey from oral tradition into literature as well as a modern, self-aware man of letters engaging deliberately and artistically with questions of mortality.
The Loneliest Boy in the World
Author: Gearoid Cheaist O Cathain
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Published: 2014-05-01
Total Pages: 170
ISBN-13: 1848898665
DOWNLOAD EBOOK* 'The Loneliest Boy in the World – he has only seagulls as playmates.' 1949 newspaper article * Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin had a unique childhood – he was the last child brought up on the Blasket Islands of Ireland's southwest coast. The nearest in age was his uncle who was thirty years older. In this affectionate memoir, Gearóid recalls growing up on the island without a doctor, priest, school, church or electricity. Despite public perception of this small, vulnerable fishing community, he remembers a wonderful childhood, cherished by parents and neighbours. His memories are entwined with the beliefs and customs handed down through the generations and are an insight into life on the Blaskets. He speaks with authority of the difficulties and challenges facing the final generation on the island. The Blaskets, with their deserted, crumbling cottages, will live on, in part due to the invaluable memories of the last child of the Great Blasket Island. • Also available: From the Great Blasket to America by Michael Carney
The Blasket Islands
Author: Joan Stagles
Publisher: Irish Amer Book Company
Published: 1998-01-01
Total Pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9780862780715
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Blasket Islands reveals the poignant history of this doomed island community off the west coast of Ireland. It discusses the community's origins, and the slow erosion of a genuine culture, one that produced a sizeable library of classic memoirs, and gives a detailed account of the island families and their inevitable fate -- the last people were evacuated in 1953 when they could no longer sustain their remote way of life.
The House of Memory
Author: John Freely
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2018-02-20
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 1101974680
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this funny and tender memoir, John Freely reflects on a remarkable life. Splitting his early childhood between the U.S. and Ireland inspired in Freely a lifelong desire to see the world and its inhabitants. At age six he settled in Brooklyn, where he spent a sometimes tumultuous boyhood amidst a large extended family: moving from house to house, the family’s belongings packed in an uncle’s hearse. Growing up poor, in his teens, Freely took whatever jobs he could when times got tough, always shaking off his losses and moving on, hungry for new experiences and adventures. He joined the U.S. Navy at seventeen to “see the world” and did just that. As a member of an elite commando unit, he was sent to one of the most remote places in Asia where he served alongside Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese forces during the last weeks of World War II. A vivid recollection on a world that now exists only in memory, The House of Memory is a lasting tribute to a life well lived, and to all of the immigrant families who have struggled, endured, and enriched our country.
On an Irish Island
Author: Robert Kanigel
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2013-02-26
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 0307389871
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn an Irish Island tells the remarkable story of a remote outpost nearly untouched by time in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the adventurous men and women who visited and were inspired by it. In a love letter to a vanished way of life, Robert Kanigel brings to life this wildly beautiful island, notable for the vivid communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke well into the twentieth century. With the Irish language rapidly disappearing, Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars, linguists, and writers during the Gaelic renaissance. As we follow these visitors—among them John Millington Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World—we are captivated both by the tiny group of islanders who kept an entire country’s past alive and by their complex relationships with those who brought the island’s story to the larger world.
