Blasket Memories

Blasket Memories
Author: Pádraig Tyers
Publisher: Mercier Press Ltd
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

An account of life on the Blasket Island and on the island's eventual demise.

From the Great Blasket to America

From the Great Blasket to America
Author: Michael Carney
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2013-04-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1848891148

Mike 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 Blasket Islandman

The Blasket Islandman
Author: Gerald Hayes
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2018-05-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1788410394

Tomás 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.

The Last Blasket King

The Last Blasket King
Author: Gerald Hayes
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2015-04-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1848898878

The 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

The Islandman

The Islandman
Author: Irene Lucchitti
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9783039118373

This 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 Vanishing World of The Islandman

The Vanishing World of The Islandman
Author: Máiréad Nic Craith
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2019-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030257754

Exploring An t-Oileánach (anglicised as The Islandman), an indigenous Irish-language memoir written by Tomás Ó Criomhthain (Tomás O'Crohan), Máiréad Nic Craith charts the development of Ó Criomhthain as an author; the writing, illustration, and publication of the memoir in Irish; and the reaction to its portrayal of an authentic, Gaelic lifestyle in Ireland. As she probes the appeal of an island fisherman’s century-old life-story to readers in several languages—considering the memoir’s global reception in human, literary and artistic terms—Nic Craith uncovers the indelible marks of Ó Criomhthain’s writing closer to home: the Blasket Island Interpretive Centre, which seeks to institutionalize the experience evoked by the memoir, and a widespread writerly habit amongst the diasporic population of the Island. Through the overlapping frames of literary analysis, archival work, interviews, and ethnographic examination, nostalgia emerges and re-emerges as a central theme, expressed in different ways by the young Irish state, by Irish-American descendants of Blasket Islanders in the US today, by anthropologists, and beyond.

Peig

Peig
Author: Peig Sayers
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1974-10-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780815602583

A reprint of the Syracuse University Press edition of 1974.

On an Irish Island

On an Irish Island
Author: Robert Kanigel
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2013-02-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307389871

On 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.

The House of Memory

The House of Memory
Author: John Freely
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2018-02-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101974680

In 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.

Oileain

Oileain
Author: David Walsh
Publisher: Pesda Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2004
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780953195695

A wealth of information on the wildlife, stories and history of the islands.For those wishing to visit in small boats or kayaks there are details of:? Landings? Camping? Drinking water? Tidal informationOileain is a detailed guide to almost every Irish offshore island. The guide is comprehensive, describing over 300 islands, big and small, far out to sea and close in by the shore, inhabited and uninhabited. Oileain tells it as it is, rock by rock, good and bad, pleasant and otherwise. It concentrates on landings and access generally, then adds information on camping, drinking water, tides, history, climbing, birds, whales, dolphins, legends or anything else of interest.Oileain will, I hope, appeal to all who go to sea in small boats, divers and yachtsmen as well as kayakers. The sheer level of detail contained in Oileain must surely throw new light on places they thought they knew well. It is not a book about kayaking. It so happens that a practical way of getting to islands is by kayak, and that is how the author gets about. Scuba divers and RIBs get in close too. Yachtsmen get about better than most, and they too enjoy exploring intensively from a dinghy. With the increasing availability of ferries, boatless people will also enjoy Oileain. Offshore islands are the last wilderness in Ireland. Hillwaking is now so popular that there are few untrampled mainland hills. Ninety per cent of offshore islands are uninhabited outside of the first fortnight in August, and eighty per cent even then. You won't meet many other people, if any at all, out beyond an Irish surf line. It is a time of change though, and holiday homes are very much the coming thing in some offshore areas. Sea going will never stop being a great adventure. Therefore, offshore islands are still the preserve of the very few. Now is a golden era for exploration.