Customer Reviews

Hungry for Home: Leaving the Blaskets: A Journey from the Edge of Ireland

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The people of the Blasket Islands, off the west coast of Kerry in Ireland, became famous for their storytelling (Twenty Years A-Growing, Peig, and The Islandman), for the purity of their Gaelic and their old Irish culture, and ultimately for the tragic removal of the dwindling population to the mainland. Cole Moreton, in 1998, began researching the history of this removal, digging up old newspaper stories, governmental records, and speaking to the few remaining living Islanders. It's a wonderful, sad, beautifully-written tale, never shrinking from the awful bits, and I came away from it yearning for a homeplace for which I could feel so deeply. (The western suburbs of Chicago just don't cut it...)

I read in the Springfield Daily News that an author had written a bookabout life on the Blasket Islands. This tweaked my curiosity becausemy mother's family was from the Blaskets. I mentioned this to myparents who were trying to find a copy of the book. I found 'Hungryfor Home' and ordered a copy for each of us.

I was stunned to findthat the book was about my second cousins. The book vividly describeswhat life on the Blasket Islands was like in the times of prosperitythrough the times of despair. It documents the circumstances thatlead to the evacuation of the island, the journey to America and thelifestyle waiting in America. Those of us enjoying the prosperity ourparents and grandparents made possible should read this book andappreciate the challenges they overcame so that we may have thelifestyle we now take for granted.

This book will be in my familylibrary for generations to come. I thank Cole Moreton for doing theresearch and writing this book.

Having read many years ago Thomas Crohan's "The Islandman" and Peig Sayer's "An Old Women's Reflections" I was somewhat aware of the Blasket Islands and the hardships of its inhabitants. It was not until last summer, when our family spent several days in the Dingle area, that I began to really appreciate those hardships. On several occasions we walked to the top of Dun Mor (a headland across the sound from the Blasket Islands) and looked out over the sound to Great Blasket Island itself. Even in the relatively fine weather, for that part of Ireland, the wind howled, the surf crashed on the rocks below and the thought of crossing the sound in a small boat as the islanders had looked very uninviting. From the top of Dun Mor we could see the barely sheltered strand of beach the islanders used and several of their cottages, long abandoned. It was moving to think of the life the they had led in their ongoing battles with nature. I bought "Hungry For Home" in part that I hoped it would help me relive my trip and in part to learn more about the islands and their peoples. I was not disappointed on either score. The author tells their story using his own travels in the area and follows the paths of the now resettled islanders to the mainland and America, while flashing back to the critical events of the 1940s and the 1950s that led to the abandonment of the islands as well as their far distant past. I found his writing style very readable. I also appreciated his tranlations of many Irish first names, surnames and placenames to English. It was evident that, as an Englisman, he wrote without unwarrantd sentimentality and without the prejudices or influences of an Irishman or an expatriate. He tells the story of the islands and their last inhabitants in a way that does them all justice.

This is a wonderfully written book that captures the beauty of the Irish west coast, the personalities of a unique population of people and a connection to the Irish of America. A great old 1934 documentary called 'Man of Aran', although filmed in Galway, captures on film how the good people of the Blaskets would have lived and worked. Cole Moreton obviously put his heart and soul into researching and writing this story and I look forward to his future projects.

Times change and people have to adapt or leave. This author takes the reader with him as he visits those who lived on the Blasket Islands at the westernmost point of Ireland before it was abandoned. Neither an Irishman nor an American, Mr. Moreton gets inside the heart of islanders as he tries to retrace the steps taken by those who left for America to find a better life and those who were left behind. The small villages of the Dingle Peninsula come to life through his narration and you feel you are there, listening to voices from a past that is harsh and cruel yet beautiful in its life struggles. This is a book to read both before and after a trip to Ireland, or if you have Irish ancestry and want to see inside a window to your family history.

Since my mother-in-law was a Kearney and born on the Great Blasket Island and after a visit to the island in 2007, this was a must read for me, my husband and our children. It is so interesting to read about what life was like and I am completely amazed at the zest for life of the people who lived their lives there. My only wish is that my husband's mother was still with us, I would have spent hours talking to her about life on the Island. The island was breathtakingly beautiful, but you only imagine how difficult life was there.

How do you take a story that has all the elements of a wonderful book, put the writing in the hands of a clearly talented and capable Author, place a jacket around the work that is as gorgeous a piece of real estate as any ever photographed, and have the result be disheartening? Mr. Moreton did this either by associating himself with an event he knew nothing of, which makes him guilty of bad research, or an event he indeed knew the details of, which makes his judgment questionable either alternative is careless/reckless.

The visual setting of this story will be familiar to many as both the movies "Ryan's Daughter" and "Far And Away" were filmed in the area. What is unusual is that an individual who is not Irish is telling this Irish tale. The only reason this is noteworthy is that he is English, and the History of the two Countries is less than amicable.

I am not suggesting that every individual of both Countries echoes the policies of the Government they live under. I just found it interesting, just as those publishing the book.

The story of those that were the final people to leave The Blasket Islands is a wonderful story albeit painful, remorseful, and full of what might have been if only someone had taken an interest. It may be more accurately stated that if Eamon deValera had made good on his word to these people the story would never need to be written, and one less sad Irish tale told.

These people on The Blasket Islands lived there for centuries, and if the book is accurate, a more difficult place to carve out an existence is hard to imagine. An event acted as a catalyst for the last to leave, and also for the book to turn from a five star read, to a book that often became mean spirited.

The people that left these Islands largely settled in Springfield Massachusetts, and so the Author traced their trail, to the extent the remainders of their route would allow. The Author spoke with many people, mostly descendents of the original Islanders but also the few that remain to tell the story first hand. And it is on this side of the Atlantic where the book transforms from a tribute to a rugged group that refused to quit until death was the only alternative, to an often mean spirited commentary from some of those being interviewed.

The reader listens to conversations that classify a variety of immigrant groups, and just as the former Irish immigrants were not always welcomed they too decide to continue the withholding of the welcome mat.

I grew up with the Irish, and while all groups have imperfections, the people I knew were decent people, who if they had an unkind word, the last place they would have shared it would have been in a book. Their social lives were not based upon Country of Origin, they did not financially support terrorists, and they did not shame themselves with public displays of imbecility.

The Author needed to make a distinction, and he failed. The people of The Blasket Islands largely emigrated here as recently as 50 years ago. Despite this the Author tries to place their History with those that arrived in the mid 19th Century. It is not a question of quality but of life experience. The immigrants that came a century later were very different in terms of what they had experienced in Ireland. It is natural they would either have unique feelings, or thoughts that were modified from the earlier immigrants 100 years before them. To suggest emigrants from a given Country, no matter what Century they arrived somehow all are alike is to do a disservice to the people involved.

Cole Moreton was a brave man to follow his passion and uncover this tragically beautiful story. Every one of us is living a kind of Island life - When we don't share our life experiences, lessons learned, hopes and fears and traditions we let go all that has been attained by our life experiences. It's lost forever.
This book put into perspective a lot of my childhood. Both of my parents immigrated from the west of Ireland in the 1940's, came to America and stayed with relatives that came before them. They made new lives for themselves here, got married had children, educated us and we had children and now I see what we've let vanish - our history. I feel like I got back some of what I came from.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author transports you to the island with his descriptive text that is not overblown with hyperbole. I feel like I know the folks he wrote about, like they're family. I highly recommed this book-- another slice of Irish history.

This was a great book, a real book, unlike those fluff teenage series based on T.V series. It explains the sorrow of poeple abandoning their ways and the regrett they feel.