Publishers Weekly
★ 12/11/2023
Historian Joyce (The Rule of Freedom) draws on his family’s background in Ireland to provide an insightful and evocative homage to the peasant way of life, which has been the dominant human experience for the past several millennia but is rapidly vanishing as agrarian lifestyles around the world give way to urbanization. Focusing mainly on Ireland, Italy, and Poland, Joyce depicts peasant culture from the perspective of those who lived it, meticulously detailing the houses in which peasants resided, their family norms, their work and tools, and their reverence for the land. He paints a sympathetic view of traditional societies, but also emphasizes the degree to which peasant life was one of suffering and pain; the daily work injured and wore down bodies, while fears of famine and the possibility of being conscripted to war were ever present. In poetic prose (“this way of understanding the Earth and the heavens is part of a past we have now lost, lost in less than a single lifetime, lost with barely a sign of its losing”), Joyce hauntingly conveys his perspective that the ramifications of the shift away from an agricultural way of life have been and will continue to be significant (“if we are cut off from the past, we are also cut off from ourselves”). Readers will be enthralled. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
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
Nominated for the Cundill History Prize
“A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“An insightful and evocative homage to the peasant way of life... Readers will be enthralled.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[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.” —Booklist
“[A] moving and sensitive rumination... Joyce shows how the supreme value of the peasant is generational survival: The great task is to hand on to the child the land the peasant has inherited, making one’s own existence a kind of interlude between past and future. His beautifully written book is equally in-between, haunted by the ghosts of the dead but also full of the warmth of human sympathy.” —The New York Times Book Review
“In this elegiac history, Joyce presents a painstaking account of a way of life to which, until recently, the vast majority of humanity was bound... The relative absence of peasants from the historical record, and the blinding speed with which they seem to have disappeared, prompt a moving final essay on the urgency of preserving our collective past.” —The New Yorker
“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
“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
“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
“...A devotional act...Joyce writes with a split consciousness, like a man recounting his dreams.” —Literary Review
“A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“An insightful and evocative homage to the peasant way of life... Readers will be enthralled.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[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.” —Booklist
Praise for Patrick Joyce and Going to My Father’s House:
Observer Book of the Year 2021
“An immensely readable, thoroughly enjoyable book... Hegel would have admired the way Joyce lets a sharply individualised life distil a whole socal history.”
—Terry Eagleton, author of Why Marx was Right
“A haunting meditation on Ireland and England, war and migration, Derry and Manchester. I admired the originality of his observations and his tone of melancholy, calm wisdom.”
—Colm Tóibín, (Books of the Year 2021), Guardian
“This is a rare kind of writing, a form of meditation on the societies that are forming and melting around us in the present. Only a voice such as this can alert us to these historical worlds.”
—Seamus Deane
“I can't think of another historian around who could write something so suggestive and profound, so much on both a minor and major scale, constantly tracing the connections between the two.” —Paul Ginsborg
“Merges personal stories with large political moments. Joyce's family came to England from Mayo and Wexford. His account of his life in London, of the legacy of war and of his experiences in Ireland is written with wisdom and grace.”
—Colm Tóibín, (Authors' and Critics' 2021 Favourites), Irish Times
“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
“[A] moving and sensitive rumination... Joyce shows how the supreme value of the peasant is generational survival: The great task is to hand on to the child the land the peasant has inherited, making one’s own existence a kind of interlude between past and future. His beautifully written book is equally in-between, haunted by the ghosts of the dead but also full of the warmth of human sympathy.” —The New York Times Book Review
“In this elegiac history, Joyce presents a painstaking account of a way of life to which, until recently, the vast majority of humanity was bound... The relative absence of peasants from the historical record, and the blinding speed with which they seem to have disappeared, prompt a moving final essay on the urgency of preserving our collective past.” —The New Yorker
“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
“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
“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
“...A devotional act...Joyce writes with a split consciousness, like a man recounting his dreams.” —Literary Review
“A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“An insightful and evocative homage to the peasant way of life... Readers will be enthralled.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[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.” —Booklist
Praise for Patrick Joyce and Going to My Father’s House:
Observer Book of the Year 2021
“An immensely readable, thoroughly enjoyable book... Hegel would have admired the way Joyce lets a sharply individualised life distil a whole socal history.”
—Terry Eagleton, author of Why Marx was Right
“A haunting meditation on Ireland and England, war and migration, Derry and Manchester. I admired the originality of his observations and his tone of melancholy, calm wisdom.”
—Colm Tóibín, (Books of the Year 2021), Guardian
“This is a rare kind of writing, a form of meditation on the societies that are forming and melting around us in the present. Only a voice such as this can alert us to these historical worlds.”
—Seamus Deane
“I can't think of another historian around who could write something so suggestive and profound, so much on both a minor and major scale, constantly tracing the connections between the two.” —Paul Ginsborg
“Merges personal stories with large political moments. Joyce's family came to England from Mayo and Wexford. His account of his life in London, of the legacy of war and of his experiences in Ireland is written with wisdom and grace.”
—Colm Tóibín, (Authors' and Critics' 2021 Favourites), Irish Times
“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
“[A] moving and sensitive rumination... Joyce shows how the supreme value of the peasant is generational survival: The great task is to hand on to the child the land the peasant has inherited, making one’s own existence a kind of interlude between past and future. His beautifully written book is equally in-between, haunted by the ghosts of the dead but also full of the warmth of human sympathy.” —The New York Times Book Review
“In this elegiac history, Joyce presents a painstaking account of a way of life to which, until recently, the vast majority of humanity was bound... The relative absence of peasants from the historical record, and the blinding speed with which they seem to have disappeared, prompt a moving final essay on the urgency of preserving our collective past.” —The New Yorker
“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
“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
“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
“...A devotional act...Joyce writes with a split consciousness, like a man recounting his dreams.” —Literary Review
“A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story.” —Kirkus (starred review)
JUNE 2024 - AudioFile
Patrick Joyce writes of the rapidly disappearing, or already vanished, European peasantry--its characteristics and culture--in this thoughtful, quietly analytic, elegiac audiobook. Narrator Philip Bird mirrors the production's best qualities, its sensitivity and intelligence, and lets its essential sadness emerge unobtrusively. His deft narration softens the frustrations of a text that can lose clarity by wandering among times and cultures. Especially in the reflective latter sections, his performance is so effortlessly attuned to the book's meaning, so subtly expressive, that it's easy to forget he's not the author. The effect is both engaging and moving. Note: Frequent references to photos in a pdf may not be helpful to listeners on the go. W.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-12-06
A British historian looks deeply into the lost past of the peasantry, people who “hope for the future but do not forget the past.”
For most of history, Joyce writes, most people belonged to the peasantry, the class of people who made their living from the land. They were concentrated in scattered villages that favored something approaching democratic rule, even in the face of larger, more autocratic systems. The author focuses on Ireland, Poland, and southern Italy, but he also ranges widely. One surprise is how rapidly peasant communities have declined as agriculture has become less central to national and international economies. The famed English village of Akenfield, for example, the subject of a canonical book of rural sociology, has largely been gentrified and its past commodified, although the village does have “some Polish immigrant workers, people now more likely to have been peasants than anyone in the place.” Across the narrow sea, “rural Ireland has receded from people’s daily awareness,” with farmland now retired for leisure and tourism. Even the Mezzogiorno of Italy, considered “among the most ‘backward’ [areas] in Europe,” has become relatively wealthy. Joyce lauds many of the habits of agricultural peoples, including economic awareness, adaptability, and generosity. For example, he notes, in rural communities, money was loaned without interest, which by definition separated peasants from capitalists; politics tended to be decentralized, resistant to central authority, and bent in many cases toward anarchism (“not surprisingly, given peasant distrust of the state”); and religious belief preserved archaic and even pre-Christian beliefs while being being marked by “its lack of dogma, its indifference to theology, its human-centered God.” Why remember these peasants? As Joyce replies resoundingly, “We have a debt to those forgotten by history”: a debt that this elegantly written book seeks to repay.
A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story.
