The Islander

By Tomas O'Crohan and Tomas O Crohan

Book Overview

Tomas O'Crohan depicts an unforgiving Blasket life through vivid, raw human experience.

This superb account of life on the Great Blasket Island off the west coast of Kerry, written as the nineteenth century draws to its close and the dawn of a new era trespasses on the lives of its small community, is both a shocking and captivating read. Here is the first complete translation of Tomas O'Crohan's autobiography An tOileanach, first published in 1929. This edition is based on Professor Sean O Coileain's definitive 2002 Irish language edition. It contains many passages omitted from the previous English language translation by Robin Flower from the 1930s, some of which were thought too earthy for the times. Tomas O'Crohan, a fisherman who, at around the age of forty, has taught himself to read and write in his own native tongue, depicts in unaffected, vivid language a very unforgiving landscape of human experience. The Islander reflects life as it was on the Blaskets, raw, real and extremely challenging.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0717157946
• ISBN13: 9780717157945
• Release Date: July 2013
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Foxfire

The book was excellent and deplicted the life of the people in Ireland during that period. Highly recommended.

The Islandman- fantastic

I read The Islandman after several visits to Ireland. This narrative or memoir gives readers a rare look at life off the coast of Kerry in the 19th Century. Relatively untouched by English influence, the lives of those living on the Great Blasket Island were different that most of the rest of Ireland. I was inspired by the book to travel to the Great Blasket Island in July 2007 and was inspired by the courage of those who made their living there throughout the 18th and 19th centuries

Beyond your local Celtic Festival

Americans have a romantic fixation with Irish culture and little cottages by the sea. (And there's nothing wrong with that.) But the next time you don your imported Aran sweater, hunt up this interesting book to get a first-person account of the Great Blasket Island off the coast of Ireland. The narrator can be as sharp as the cold Atlantic winds, but even if you wouldn't want to take tea with him, you'll admire the detailed portrait he draws of this isolated place lost in time. Just remember, like the island itself, this is not a cozy book, but a bracing one.

The Islandman

A fine book detailing the life of a native of the blasket island group off the southwest coast if Ireland. The author gives a detailed view of life in a remote 19th century Irish speaking culture that remained unchanged from the middle ages to the 2nd world war. Noted for it's poets and storytellers the blaskets remained one of the bastions of the irish language oral tradition.