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...

The island of the Great Blasket and its remote fishing community lies three miles of the Kerry coast of Ireland, at the westernmost tip of Europe. Virtually unknown before this century, it is now famous throughout the world as the source of a rich and unique flowering of literature, a tradition as old as the Gaelic language itself. Now again available, these seven volumes--all translated from the original Gaelic--offer engaging accounts of a now-vanished lifestyle, a group of stories that will charm readers of Irish literature, those moved by a nostagia for "simpler times," and anyone who...