Island Cross-Talk: Pages From a Diary

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 enjoys a good tale well told. Originally published in 1928, this was the first book to come out of the Blasket Islands. In these pages from his diary, O'Crohan jotted down snatches of conversation, anecdotes, descriptions of the landscape and the sea. These unadorned, yet vivid sketches capture and preserve the essence of a way of life which was rapidly receding into the past even as he wrote.