Synopses & Reviews
Tomas O'Crohan was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1865 and died there in 1937, a great master of his native Irish. He shared to the full the perilous life of a primitive community, yet possessed a shrewd and humorous detachment that enabled him to observe and describe the world. His book is a valuable description of a now vanished way of life; his sole purpose in writing it was in his own words, 'to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again'.
The Blasket Islands are three miles off Irelands Dingle Peninsula. Until their evacuation just after the Second World War, the lives of the 150 or so Blasket Islanders had remained unchanged for centuries. A rich oral tradition of story-telling, poetry, and folktales kept alive the legends and history of the islands, and has made their literature famous throughout the world. The 7 Blasket Island books published by OUP contain memoirs and reminiscences from within this literary tradition, evoking a way of life which has now vanished.
Review
"Will stand for a long time as the definitive treatment of its topic."--Jack Wertheimer, Commentary
"The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American anti-Semitism....Concise, highly readable....A major contribution."--Philip Perlmutter, The Boston Globe
"No other historian of the subject has done anything approaching this monumental, narrative synthesis of previous scholarship in many different disciplines, melded with original research in impressive depth. The variety of sources the author draws upon, and the engrossing detail he has extracted
from them, continually surprised and impressed me. The treatment of complex events is nicely rounded and generally nuanced....A major work of scholarship."--John Higham, author of Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America
Synopsis
Tomas O'Crohan's sole purpose in writing The Islandman was, he wrote, "to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be seen again." This is an absorbing narrative of a now-vanished way of life, written by one who had known no other.