"The Crofter and the Laird"

OVERVIEW:

In 1969, John McPhee, a staff writer on The New Yorker, decided to transport himself and his family across the ocean and to live, for a time, in the tiny Hebridean island of his forefathers. His children enrolled at the island school and the family took up residence in a crofthouse, being accepted readily into the local community. Thus John McPhee, an accomplished author of international renown, came to devote some months to the meticulous study of a distinctive society.

The Crofter and the Laird was the extraordinary result, a work of literary genius. This is not a traveller’s tale, nor is it a study of the history or topography of an island; it is instead a perfect mirror of the interactions and relationships of a living and coherent community, one which can be examined and understood only because it is so tightly circumscribed.

(John McPhee later won a Pulitzer Prize for "Annals of the Former World").

“Quite astonishing. And even the Gaelic names are spelt correctly. The book is in many ways unusually frank and the portraits incisive ... neither sentimental nor judgmental, but clear-cut and sensible.” Iain Crichton Smith

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