Hungry for Home: A Journey from the Edge of Ireland

Synopsis

Moreton delivers this beautiful, haunting, previously untold story of a vanished people from the edge of Ireland and the events that led to the abandonment of their way of life. This book is about home and what that means and a gripping account of the quest for a vanished people. [From the back cover:] "On Christmas Eve, 1946, a young man collapsed on a remote island off the coast of Ireland. There was no priest, no doctor, and no policeman on the Great Blasket, and no contact with the outside world. Helpless, his family watched him die. Cole Moreton's Hungry for Home tells the story of an Irish island, whose inhabitants lived a medieval way of life and spoke a pure form of Irish, until the dramatic events that led to its being abandoned. Searching for the islanders who had left half a century earlier, Moreton seeks out the dead man's brothers and finds them in America. This is a book about home and what that means, but most of all it is a story of a family and their breathtaking journey from one way of life to another." The author tells the story he learned from articles and books, but most importantly from the last islanders themselves. Cole Moreton spent years exploring the remains of the village on the Blasket Island, making land and sea journeys as it's people did, tracing their path to reside on Mainland Ireland and across the Atlantic to the United States. As he visits former islanders, whose children have become quite Americanized, he discovers that the Blasket community reassembled itself in Connecticut in an area they named Hungry Hill. Excerpts of books written by islanders, and accounts of their work, stories, loves and losses are revealing and moving, and as the author admits, often edited by the tellers to cast their former Blasket home and way of life in the best possible light. Here is the story of the crumbling of a centuries old culture. A list of family names, list of illustrations, and a useful bibliography are included.

Copyright:

2000

Book Details

Book Quality:

Excellent

Book Size:

289 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780141001944

Publisher:

Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

Date of Addition:

05/18/10

Copyrighted By:

Cole Moreton

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Travel, Biographies and Memoirs, Social Studies

Submitted By:

Evan Reese

Proofread By:

Lissi

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.