ROBERT 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 The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Harvard Magazine, and Psychology Today. He has just retired as Professor of Science Writing at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now lives in Baltimore.
“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 On an Irish Island 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, The Wall Street Journal
“Deliciously hones in on the ‘singularly severe glory’ of the
Blasket Islands off the west coast of county Kerry.”—Katharine
Whittemore, The Boston Globe
“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, The Washington
Post
“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, The Daily Beast
“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, The San Francisco Chronicle
“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
Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter
“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.” –Kirkus Reviews,
(starred)
“[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, Booklist
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