The Last Who Remember

We live in a modern world of social media, cars, electricity, supermarkets, television, fast food, and Hollywood pop culture, and few Westerners have known anything else. Ireland, however, modernized long after most Western countries; many rural areas lacked electricity or technology even in the 1970s. Within living memory villagers lived much as humans had for centuries, or as the Amish do today; they grew and raised their own food, built their own homes, traded with their neighbours, and spent their evenings making their own music and telling their own stories.

When Brian Kaller moved to a homestead in rural Ireland, he found that some of his elderly neighbours grew up this way, the last who remember a traditional world. Over the next two decades Kaller interviewed his neighbours and assembled oral histories, archives, diaries and memoirs to create a portrait of their lives that can help illuminate traditional cultures everywhere.

The Last Who Remember invites the reader on a tour of agrarian life, with each chapter, devoting chapters to childhood, schooling, working, socialising, courting, and dying. He looks at the safe, literate, high-trust society they created, and shows how their self-reliance and close communities sustained them in times of hardship. He compares it to today's unprecedented levels of unhappiness, mental illness and addiction while surrounded by material goods, and questions what we abandoned when we became modern.