Tomas Bairead is regarded as one of the finest short-story writers in Irish of the twentieth-century. His memoir recounts his youth on a small farm in an isolated region of the west of Ireland, one of the last Gaeltachtai or Irish-speaking districts. An active member of the Irish Volunteers in his area and a talented writer of both Irish and English, Bairead was part of the first-generation of Irish people who made their living as journalists in the newly-independent Irish Republic. His memories of working as a newspaper-man in the Irish capital, Dublin, make for fascinating reading, as do...