Robert Kanigel - ON AN IRISH ISLAND | Octavia Books | New Orleans, Louisiana

Start: 03/14/2012 6:00 pm

Please join us for an evening with Robert Kanigel, the highly praised author of The Man Who Knew Infinity and The One Best Way, who is coming to present and sign his new book, ON AN IRISH ISLAND, a love letter to a vanished way of life. In it, Kanigel gives us a sparkling history of the remarkable Great Blasket Island, an Irish outpost nearly untouched by time in the first half of the twentieth century. He tells the story of this wildly beautiful island, notable for the unadulterated Irish language spoken by its residents, and recalls the adventurous men and women who were inspired by it.

With the Irish language rapidly vanishing throughout the rest of the country, the Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars and writers, linguists and playwrights, drawn there during the Gaelic renaissance to study and to learn. As we follow these visitors—among them John Millington Synge, author of the classic drama The Playboy of the Western World—we become immersed both in the fascinating culture of the 150 or so islanders who, tucked away from the rest of civilization, kept alive an entire country’s past, and in the newcomers and residents alike who would bring the island’s remarkable story to the larger world.

“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

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 lives in Baltimore.