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9781680535662 Academic Inspection Copy

The Last Who Remember

Traditional Ireland in the Words of its People
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For nearly two decades, Brian Kaller has immersed himself in the communal world of rural Ireland and fumbled toward a more traditional way of life for himself while raising a daughter in the countryside. Kaller's prodigious work with communal elders, archives, oral histories, and memoirs has assembled a portrait of 20th century Ireland that can tell us a great deal about traditional cultures everywhere. The Last Who Remember invites the reader on a tour through rural life and shows how self-reliance and close communities keep the human spirit alive in times of desperate poverty and political turmoil. In each chapter, Kaller examines a different aspect of traditional life: childhood, schooling, eating, socialising, courting, and dying. He describes ancient crafts still practiced, from scything to smithing - and learned many of these crafts himself. The Last Who Remember asks why people in modern societies report less happiness than previous generations, even with the convenience of technology. By demonstrating the social bonds and common rituals of Ireland's traditional society, Kaller questions what we lack in the modern world. By exploring a traditional culture, this book invites the reader to reexamine our assumptions about our own past and reevaluate where our society is heading.
Brian Kaller worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor in the United States before moving to rural Ireland to raise his daughter. There he grew food and raised chickens on a homestead and tried his hand at blacksmithing, basketry, wall-building, knifemaking, woodworking, winemaking, beekeeping, and old methods of food preservation, among other crafts. For 17 years he has written a weekly column on sustainable living for Irish newspapers, which has a strong following and has been reprinted on environmentalist websites, including www.resilience.org. Mr. Kaller has written about traditional life for Mother Earth News, Grit, and The Dallas Morning News. He has also written for The American Conservative, First Things, and Quillette. He has appeared on Ireland's national television station, RTE, to comment on American politics and has given frequent talks at churches and universities throughout the United States. Mr. Kaller's experiments with traditional food preservation have been featured on the popular BBC television series QI.
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