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Remembering Peasants
- Author
- Patrick Joyce
- Narrator
- Philip Bird
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Publish Date
- 15 February 2024
- Run Time
- 12 hours 39 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
A way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban.
In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people. In contrast to the usual insulting stereotypes, we discover a rich and complex culture: traditions, songs, celebrations, and revolts, across Europe from the plains of Poland to the farmsteads and villages of Italy and Ireland, through the 19th century to the present day. Into this passionate history, written with exquisite care, Joyce weaves remarkable individual stories, including those of his own Irish family, and looks at how peasant life has been remembered - and misremembered - in contemporary culture.
This is a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history. Yet for Joyce, we are all the children of peasants, who must respect the experience of our ancestors. This is particularly pressing when our knowledge of the land is being lost to climate crisis and the rise of industrial agriculture. Enlightening, timely, and vital, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on our history and our future remains profoundly relevant.
© Patrick Joyce 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024
Critics Review
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A dozen pages in I realized that I had been waiting for much of my life to read this extraordinary book. Anyone who has ever tried to unravel the intertwined skeins of ancestry, sociology, music, geography and history will gape at Joyce’s skill. On almost every page the reader gets a jolt, a palpable sensation of immersion in the disappeared world of peasantry. A central part of the book is Joyce’s own family’s peasant past. I too, like many people, am only two generations and one language away from these ancestors. Because the time of the peasants is still palpable there are clues and messages here for every fortunate reader who picks up this book
Annie Proulx
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Joyce is the modern historian of uncharted lives and the landscapes of post-industry and post-agriculture. Like all the Joyces, he writes with extraordinary precision and grace
Colm Tóibín
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A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story
Kirkus
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Joyce’s study is an elegy for a way of life, … a moving and sensitive rumination…What gives Remembering Peasants its distinctiveness and its depth is the import of that word 'personal' in his subtitle. Its poignancy is intimate…Joyce is as much a necromancer, summoning the dead and bidding them speak, as he is a conventional historian… His beautifully written book is …haunted by the ghosts of the dead but also full of the warmth of human sympathy. Remembering Peasants is imbued with the diffuse and melancholy glow of a sinking sun
The New York Times
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Remembering Peasants is a work of salvage and salvation, a great rescuing of Europe’s earth-toilers from historical neglect and erasure… a heart-writ valediction… Joyce is a propitious name for a writer of Irish heritage, but the author is more Heaney than Dubliners; his prose is peat-rich, dense with feeling as well as fact
The Times
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Books such as Remembering Peasants are landmarks and waymarkers... This is important, vital writing and study. The level of craftsmanship in the book is evident, but so too is its heart and soul. Reading it, I was changed and charged… Joyce is essential reading for anyone who cares about our shared past. A profound book
The Irish Times
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Joyce writes with a split consciousness, like a man recounting his dreams. It was so real, this lost life, and yet it is impossible to recapture
The Literary Review
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Joyce takes us to some of the places Europeans have established to remember peasants... But the most poignant of all are journeys to his ancestral home in Ireland’s far west… As its title indicates, Joyce’s lament is also a call to remember. Well written, expansive and often deeply moving, this is a fitting monument to Europe’s peasants
The Financial Times
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An insightful and evocative homage to the peasant way of life… Readers will be enthralled
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Joyce rages against the amnesia hardwired into today’s 'all consuming' present... A loving and unconventional work of genealogy, and a melancholic elegy for bygone ways of being
The Irish Independent
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Details
- Author
- Patrick Joyce
- Narrator
- Philip Bird
- Duration
- 12 hours 39 minutes
- Release Date
- 15 February 2024
- ISBN
- 9780241611678
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Genre
- Social and cultural history, Rural communities, Human geography, European history, The countryside, country life: general interest
Synopsis
Brought to you by Penguin. A way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban.In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people. In contrast to the usual insulting stereotypes, we discover a rich and complex culture: traditions, songs, celebrations, and revolts, across Europe from the plains of Poland to the farmsteads and villages of Italy and Ireland, through the 19th century to the present day. Into this passionate history, written with exquisite care, Joyce weaves remarkable individual stories, including those of his own Irish family, and looks at how peasant life has been remembered - and misremembered - in contemporary culture.This is a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history. Yet for Joyce, we are all the children of peasants, who must respect the experience of our ancestors. This is particularly pressing when our knowledge of the land is being lost to climate crisis and the rise of industrial agriculture. Enlightening, timely, and vital, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on our history and our future remains profoundly relevant.© Patrick Joyce 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024
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