{"product_id":"on-an-irish-island-isbn-9780307389879","title":"On an Irish Island","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eOn an Irish Island \u003c\/i\u003etells 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Playboy of the Western World\u003c\/i\u003e—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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Wonderfully vivid . . . A remote setting, a handful of young visitors, a collection of colorful locals, an ancient language and a story that spans half a century:   These are but a few of the elements that make Robert Kanigel’s \u003ci\u003eOn an Irish Island\u003c\/i\u003e an exuberant and delightful book. . . . It can be read as an erudite primer to the [literary] works of the islanders; as a beautifully assured ensemble biography; and as a large-scale portrait of a remarkable time in the history of the Great Blasket and the wider world.   Yet it is, above all, a compelling tale of ordinary—and often enviable—lives in an extraordinary setting.”—Karin Altenberg, \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Deliciously hones in on the ‘singularly severe glory’ of the Blasket Islands off the west coast of county Kerry.”—Katharine Whittemore, \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Tells a fascinating piece of history . . . [Nowadays], what’s gone is the whole concept of village life, without television, iPads or Beyonce.  There’s no point in posing questions about where such a life went, or whether we can get it back.  But now, at least, we’ve got this lovely book.”—Carolyn See, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“It is the interaction of the natives and the visitors that fascinates Kanigel, and he tells the story of the community’s last decades through the succession of visitors, beginning with the playwright John Millington Synge. . . Affection for the place and its culture is something Kanigel first admires and then comes to share, and he makes his reader envy those tough, resourceful islanders.”—Malcolm Jones, \u003ci\u003eThe Daily Beast\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Kanigel avoids pushing any thesis about the advantages of premodern life, and instead points out the glories of the island and its inhabitants.”—Rachel Nolan, \u003ci\u003eThe San Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Robert Kanigel has written a tender paean to a lost world that called him out of his own time. On a bleak, treeless island, he unearths a buried linguistic treasure.” —Dava Sobel, author of \u003ci\u003eLongitude\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eGalileo’s Daughter\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A mesmerizing interplay of lives and socio-historical contexts . . . The portraits in this book are classic Kanigel:  lively, sympathetic and thoroughly engaging.   Yet what makes the narrative so affecting is the loss that permeates the text.  As cultures like those on Great Blasket continue to be destroyed by the march of progress, so too are our connections to a simpler, more personally fulfilling way of living.” –\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews,\u003c\/i\u003e (starred)\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“[An] impressively researched , greatly inviting history of the curious-minded men and women who, in the early twentieth century, came from mainland Ireland and elsewhere to reside on the Great Blasket for a while, to absorb the slower way of Irish customs before the advent of electricity and other aspects of fast-paced contemporary life.”—Brad Hooper, \u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e             \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/p\u003eROBERT KANIGEL is the author of six previous books. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Grady-Stack Award for science writing. His book \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eMan Who Knew Infinity \u003c\/i\u003ewas a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eMagazine, The\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review, Harvard Magazine, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003ePsychology Today. \u003c\/i\u003eHe has just retired as Professor of Science Writing at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now lives in Baltimore.\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Hardcover Edition\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e1905\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore George Thomson, of course, others had crossed  thethree miles of Blasket Sound that separated the Great Blasket from  themainland, or had explored the smaller rocky islands, mostly  uninhabited, thatwere its neighbors, the so-called Lesser Blaskets. They  recorded birdsightings. They took geological samples. Most never said  much about their visits-or, left unaccountably unmoved by the awful  splendor of the islands,perhaps had nothing much to say in the first  place. Revenue agents of the Englishking occasionally appeared; at least  once, the story goes, islanders peltedthem from the overhanging cliffs  with rocks, chasing them back to their boats.Protestant missionaries  visited, too, determined to turn islanders away from dark Papist  ignorance.   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1843, Mrs. D. P. Thomson, wife of a Protestant clericon  the mainland (and unrelated to George Thomson), visited the Great  Blasket.It was difficult even to get onto the island, she wrote in a  book published afew years later, since one must \"take advantage of the  swell of the waveand leap on the rocks\" from the shifting, unsteady  platform of the boat.Once on land, she \"was more affected than I have  the power to describe, bywitnessing human nature reduced to the savage  state it is among theseislanders, within almost ear-shot of religious  light and civilization.\"Mrs. Thomson told of local women and children  crowded into the school room,\"chewing seaweed incessantly,\" who pressed  lengths of it \"into their mouths with their thumbs in a most savage  manner, and spat aboutunceremoniously at will; they touched my dress,  turned me round and round tolook at every separate article, laughed with  admiration at my shoes and gloves,kissed and stroked my old silk gown.\"  After submitting to this inspection,she proceeded to speak to them of  Jesus Christ.   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1892, Jeremiah Curtin arrived on the island.  AnAmerican from Milwaukee, Harvard-trained, Curtin was a linguist  visiting WestKerry in search of folklore. New Year's Day found him in  Tralee. He took thetrain to Dingle, came around through Ventry and the  neighboring villages,visited Ballyferriter, and finally was rowed out to  the Great Blasket. There hefound \"perhaps 20 straw-thatched cabins, the  thatch held in place by anetwork of straw ropes fastened down with  stones.\" Piles of manure stoodin front of each, cattle being kept in  them at night. Curtin was in search ofGaelic myths he'd been assured  he'd be able to gather like flowers from afield. But the pickings were  slim: \"I care more about getting the price ofa bottle of whiskey than  about old stories,\" one man told him. Curtin soonleft, gleaning for his  trouble only a photo or two of the thatched-roof villagehe had too  briefly visited.   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first to see the island with new eyes and tell  theworld about it was John Millington Synge. This preternaturally  giftedplaywright, this quiet brooding literary force, discovered on the  island in1905 something of the luminous spirit later visitors would find  as well. He wasthirty-four at the time and had less than four years to  live. But in his shortlife, he'd already gained stature as a notable  figure of the literary revivalthen washing over Ireland. Three of his  plays had been produced by the AbbeyTheatre in Dublin or its predecessor  companies. In the time he had left hewould write another, The Playboy  of the Western World, swollen with such lusciouslanguage that, by one  estimation, it added up to \"the most fertile andvigorous poetic dialogue  written for the stage since Shakespeare.\" Itsincidents, characters, and  speech were rooted in the spoken Irish Synge heardon his visits to  Ireland's west, including the Blasket. Gone, from hisrendering of the  island, was the ugly primitivism marking earlier accounts. Hefound  instead among the peasants there an abiding grace and dignity.   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThose  earlier visitors had come to the island luggingheavy loads of cultural  baggage . . . and so did Synge. For, by the time of hisvisit in 1905,  the Blaskets weren't just islands in the farthest westernreaches of  Ireland. They were The West, which had come to stand for thedeepest,  purest wells of Irish nationhood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn  those days Ireland, or Eire,didn't exist as an independent state;  Ireland was British. To anyself-respecting Irishman of republican  sympathies, of course, Ireland was neverBritish, merely occupied by  them. Still, for seven hundred years Ireland had beenvariously invaded,  conquered, and colonized by England, and for centuries England'sreigning  monarch reigned over Ireland as well. Since the capitulation  followingthe Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim in 1690 and 1691, feeling  against the Englishran deep. The Catholic-Protestant divide that had  split Europe since theReformation played out in Ireland, too. Catholics  were barred from voting,serving in the Irish parliament, or sometimes  even practicing their religion.Protestant landlords owned most of the  land, evicting impoverished Catholictenants at their whim. The murderous  Famine of the 1840s, though set off bycrop failure, had been  exacerbated by English indifference. Periodically,resistance to British  rule took violent form, but more often it was purelypolitical, as in the  nineteenth-century struggle for \"home rule,\"Charles Stewart Parnell's  Irish Parliamentary Party, and various republican brotherhoods and  kindred nationalist groups.   In the closing years of the nineteenth  century, fresh interestin the Irish language further confounded  Ireland's tortured relationship with England.Late in the same year as  Jeremiah Curtin's visit to the Blaskets, on November25, 1892, Douglas  Hyde went before the newly formed Irish National LiterarySociety in  Dublin and delivered a lecture that one critic, Declan Kiberd, wouldcall  \"Ireland's declaration of cultural independence.\" It bore thetitle \"The  Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.\"   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA thirty-two-year-old  linguist, son of a Church ofIreland rector, Hyde had grown up hearing  old people in his native CountyRoscommon speaking Irish, and through  them glimpsed a rich Gaelic culture he'dnever encountered among his own  family and their friends. That Ireland, hedeclared now, was dying.  Ireland's problems lay in its rejection of all thingsGaelic, and its  embrace-sometimes willing, sometimes forced-of everything English.In  Anglicizing themselves, he declared, the Irish \"have thrown away with  alight heart the best claim which we have upon the world's recognition  of us asa separate nationality.\" It was, he asserted, \"our Gaelic past  which,though the Irish race does not recognize it just at present, is  really at thebottom of the Irish heart.\"   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Ireland of the seventh  century, he reminded hislisteners, was \"then the school of Europe and  the torch of learning\";the Dark Ages had been brightened by the wit and  intellect of Irish monks,bards, and scholars. But over the past century,  Ireland had become cut off fromits roots. Irish had fallen into disuse.  O'Mulligans had taken English nameslike Baldwin, O'Hennesys were now  Harringtons, Eibhlins were Ellens. Pipers andfiddlers were disappearing.  The harp, long a symbol of Ireland, was becomingextinct. Irish jerseys  had given way to shoddy cast-off clothes from Manchesterand London.   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNeeded was, for example, to \"set our faces againstthis aping of English  dress, and encourage our women to spin and our men towear comfortable  frieze suits of their own wool, free from shoddy andhumbug.\" Irish  autonomy demanded sweeping de-Anglicization. \"We muststrive to  cultivate,\" declared Hyde, \"everything that is most racial,most smacking  of the soil, most Gaelic, most Irish, because . . . this islandis and  will ever remain Celtic at the core.\"   The following year, Hyde helped  establish the GaelicLeague, which for the next two decades would  champion a revival of Irishculture and language. Forget politics, Hyde  as much as said; the core of Irishidentity lay in the Irish language.  \"My own ambition,\" he would writelater, was \"language as a neutral  ground upon which all Irishmen mightmeet.\" Through the last years of the  nineteenth century and first decadeof the twentieth, the League's  influence spread. \"Whatever it was tenyears ago,\" a Dublin professor  wrote in 1907 of Gaelic, \"it is verymuch alive now. . . . You see Gaelic  inscriptions over the shops, Gaelic on thestreet labels, Gaelic in  advertisements, a Gaelic column in newspapers. . . . The Gaelic League is  everywhere.\" Irish youth might not much care for Frenchor German, but  during these years they did for Gaelic, for Irish: \"Theywant to learn  Irish, as they want no other language on earth.\" And whenleaders of the  language movement looked around Ireland for exemplars of allthat was  Irish at its purest and best, they looked fixedly west.   Think of  Ireland as two hundred miles across and threehundred miles  north-to-south and you won't be far wrong. Across this breadth,however,  its population is, and was, distributed unequally. Its two  largestcities, Belfast and Dublin, both lay off inlets to the Irish Sea  and facedeast, to Scotland and England. The weight of its bigger,  stronger Englishneighbor was felt unevenly across the country, too. The  English first invadedin the twelfth century, expanding and colonizing  from east to west, bringingwith them English place-names, English  families, English castles. After theReformation, Protestantism made its  strongest inroads in the east, encroachingbut feebly in the west. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  English language, meanwhile, squeezed out Irish until, by the 1850s,  little of the native language could be heard outside partsof Counties  Donegal, Mayo, Galway, and Kerry, all in the west.   So by the time our  story begins in the early years of thetwentieth century, \"Ireland\"  meant, roughly speaking, twoIrelands-split not along the familiar divide  of Northern Ireland and the southof recent political history, but along  an east-west axis. The east was overwhelmingly English-speaking,  included substantial Protestant minorities,and boasted big cities that  looked like those of England and Scotland, with alltheir coal dust,  clamor, and corruption. The poor, rural, mostly Roman Catholicwest, with  its Irish-speaking enclaves, was typically seen as a throwback to  asimpler, purer past that elsewhere in Ireland had been overrun by the  noisy andthe new.   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere, though, could be found the precious seed that  oneday might be planted in an Irish political soil more hospitable to  its growth.To Irish nationalists, historian Kevin Whelan would observe,  the rural west was\"the authentic Ireland, a materialization of an  unsullied primordialpast,\" the Irish-speaking Aran or Blasket islander  its exemplar. Toanother scholar, Kevin Martin, the western islands were  \"part of the creationmyth\" of a new Ireland aborning.   And this was The  West that, with its distinctivedialects, drew John Millington Synge.    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBorn in 1871, Synge had come out of the DublinAscendancy; that is, his  family was long and deeply Irish, butProtestant-landed gentry from  Wicklow on his father's side. The son of abarrister, he'd studied  languages at Trinity College, Dublin, at the timevirtually reserved for  Protestants. Settling on becoming a musician, he livedin Germany, Italy,  and France. In Paris, at the Sorbonne, he came under theinfluence of  one of Europe's foremost Celtic scholars, H. d'Arbois deJubainville, who  nurtured in him a love of Irish. Also in Paris, he met WilliamButler  Yeats, already a major literary figure, who recognized his talents  and,in the familiar story, bestowed on him among the most famous hard  nubs ofliterary advice ever offered and accepted. \"Go to the Aran  Islands,\"he told Synge. \"Live there as if you were one of the people  themselves;express a life that has never found expression.\"   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore  Synge went to the Blaskets, then, he went to Aran, three remote islands  in Galway Bay, across from the mainland wilderness ofConnemara. He made  his first trip there in 1898, being rowed out the first timein a  curragh. \"It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction,\" hewrote later,  \"to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rudecanvas canoe  of a model that has served primitive races since men first went tosea.\"  Between then and 1902, he returned to Aran four times, for four anda  half months all told, his mastery of Irish improving with each visit.    Synge was a swarthy, thick-necked man with a great shockof dark hair and  a bushy mustache, and had all the hallmarks of healthy, virilemanhood  to him. But in fact he was sick much of his life-with asthma in hisyouth  and then Hodgkin's disease, which began to afflict him in his  latetwenties and would kill him before he turned forty. He was, though,  anenergetic walker, tramping across the hills and down the dusty roads.  He'd goup and talk to anybody he happened to meet. Yet he was  essentially shy, hisseeming gregariousness more spur to the stories and  speech of others than signof any great need to speak himself. As every  portrait of him somehow suggests,his was a silent absorbing presence. To  the Aran Islanders, one critic noted, Synge was \"so strange and silent  that no one actually knew him.\" Hisgift was to listen through those deep  moody eyes, and transmute the language offisherman and peasant, weaver  and tramp, into art. First, in 1903, came In theShadow of the Glen, a  grim one-act comedy in which an old peasant feigns deathto test his  wife's fidelity. Then Riders to the Sea, a one-act tragedyexhibiting, by  one estimation, \"an almost Aeschylean starkness and grandeur.\"   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSynge's  accounts of his Aran visits had not yet beenpublished when, early in  the new century, he was drawn to another Irish-speaking enclave in the  west. Separated from one another by broad rangesof English-speaking  Ireland, the last remaining Irish-speaking areas, each moreand more unto  itself, had split into distinctive dialects. There was DonegalIrish to  the north. And Connemara Irish, which is what the Aran Islandersspoke,  down the coast. And Munster Irish in the southwest, which includedCounty  Kerry. The differences were notable. Most spoken Irish, for  example,stressed first syllables; Munster sometimes shifted emphasis to  the last. Words known in Ulster were unknown elsewhere. The country's  zealous language enthusiasts exhorted Irish-learners to explore them all.    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSynge felt the tug. His brother Robert had recommended aKerry family  with whom he could stay, with whom he might unearth a new bountyof Irish  stories and Irish expression. During parts of four summers Synge  wouldvisit Kerry; these yielded dialogue, plot material, and  idiosyncrasies oflanguage that would inform his later work. And on one  of these trips, in July 1905, he wrote to Willie Long of Ballyferriter,  County Kerry, at the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula, seeking a place  more pristinely Irish yet.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e If there was anything like a local  aristocracy in this far-off, underpopulated little town, Long-well off,  loquacious, a bit ofbluster to him-was it. He was a forty-six-year-old  father of four sons and twodaughters, a well-connected merchant,  innkeeper, and schoolteacher. Local ordinance apparently barred teachers  from keeping inns. So, to get around it, the low-ceilinged, two-story  little place on the main street of Ballyferriterover which he presided  bore the name of his brother instead.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302217437413,"sku":"NP9780307389879","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307389879.jpg?v=1767734074","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/on-an-irish-island-isbn-9780307389879","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}