Connemara: Listening to the Wind (Connemara Trilogy 1) | 
| Author: Tim Robinson
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 252276
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 1.3
ISBN: 1844880664
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.74
EAN: 9781844880669
ASIN: 1844880664
Publication Date: February 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Almost like new. Unread.
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Product Description
In 1999, Tim Robinson established himself as one of Irelands most brilliant nonfiction writers with the two-volume Stones of Aran, a tribute to the unspoiled wild of Irelands Aran Islands. With Connemara, he creates an indelible portrait of a small corner of the world. From the unmarked graves of unbaptized infants to the shimmering peaks of the Twelve Pins, Robinson brings his close attention and dazzling prose to describe the mountains, bogs, shorelines, and landscape of his home and, at the same time, make a great statement about the world at large.
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| Customer Reviews:
mapping Connemara in myriad ways June 14, 2008
From botanical treasure troves to pre-historical geology lessons, then onto oral history, social history and biography; this book of Robinson's ranges as widely and wildly as he does around Connemara, its past, present and future. This book is packed extraordinarily with facts, historical references and anecdotes woven together very deftly. Gladly it also includes an index and its sources are well referenced. This artfulness is possibly due to the author having such a wide range of interests and understanding that he is able to bring together and focus carefully and sharply on the area he now calls 'home'.
There are wonderful diversions that provide their own intriguing association with the history of this part of Ireland. For example references to the Braun-Blanquet system of classifying plant communities and the "skirmish in the centuries-old philosophy wars between anglophone empiricism and continental metaphysics" (p233) and to Richard Berridge (an absentee landlord in Connemara) whose will included the princely sum of 46,000 in 1887 that went to the Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine (flourishing still today) and 4,000 to The National Health Society to "collect and diffuse sanitary knowledge, and all other knowledge bearing on the physical and moral welfare of all classes of society;" (p352).
For those that like a meandering tale teller, who packs his stories densely with research references and refrains from overwhelming you with their experience or perspective, these are stories to slowly but surely, work your way through. Robinson draws the reader along in a way that perhaps he also wends his way through the landscape he has settled in. In sharing his thoughts, learnings, the anecdotes of others and his passion for mapping, the writing is easy (in that the reader doesn't labour with it) and the reader is gently drawn into his learning and learnedness. In describing the effect of scientific mapping and investigation Robinson rather uncannily reflects his own approach to his storytelling of Connemara and its past:
"The patient eyes of science disentangle the chaos of phenomena, naming, classifying, hypothesizing causal connections, reconstituting it as a highly individuated organic whole, fragile but adaptive, simultaneously rivalrous and convivial. Some may feel that this intellectual process distances one from reality, or reduces it, drives the spirit out of it, frightens the cuckoo out of the wood. But I have always found it a form of awareness, an introduction to wonder." (p383)
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