Hungry for Home

by Cole Moreton

Book Overview

Beyond the far west coast of Ireland lies the Great Blasket Island. Beautiful, desolate and surrounded by wild seas, it was once home to a small but fiercely independent community. By November 1953,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670892076
• ISBN13: 9780670892075
• Release Date: July 2000
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

a rare glimpse of something beautiful

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.

A Deep Yearning

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...)

Blasket Family History

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.

Wonderful Imagery...

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.

A Well Writen Look At The Abandment of The Blasket Island

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.