Product Description

For more than 2000 years the people of St Kilda remained remote from the world. Its society was viable, even Utopian; but in the nineteenth century the island was discovered by missionaries, do-gooders and tourists, who brought money, disease and despotism. St Kildan culture gradually disintegrated and in 1930 the few remaining islanders asked to be evacuated.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48354 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 210 pages

Review
"'A story like a marvellous pebble, wet from the sea, strange and comic like all things out of step with time, sad as the old songs the women sang, splendidly told...' Sunday Times 'A fascinating book...Charles Maclean is an excellent writer...he describes the story of St Kilda with powerful compassion.' Magnus Magnusson 'What the St Kildan story, as told by Maclean, did for me was to reawaken my awe at the strangeness of our world.' Will Self"

About the Author
Charles Maclean was born in 1946, eldest son of Sir Fitzroy Maclean of Strachur, Argyll. He was educated at Eton and Oxford. Before becoming a full-time writer he had a variety of jobs, including periods as a merchant seaman and as a cowboy; he also played in a rock and roll band. In a diverse and international writing career, he has been on the staff of Vogue and The Ecologist. He has also written prose fiction, including The Pathetic Phallus (1977), The Watcher (1982) and The Silence (1996). In the mid-'70s he spent two years writing and researching The Wolf Children, a true story of two girls found living with wolves in the jungles of Bengal and published to wide praise in 1977. He has also written a number of books on the landscape and culture of Scotland, including Malt Whisky (1997) Scottish Country (1992) and Romantic Scotland (2000).

Customer Reviews

Great synopsis of the St Kilda story
A fantastic introduction to the islands collectively known as St Kilda. I've read several books about St Kilda and this interpretation combines readability and historical statistics just about perfectly. If you want to read your first book on St Kilda, you can't go far wrong with this.

Well, that's one view!
I found this book drab and uninteresting among many better texts on the history of the island.

There are much better books to buy on what is a fantastic place with real history and which deserves a more imaginative commentary.

Poor.

Full of information but chronologically confusing at times
I wanted to find out more about St Kilda, the St Kildans and their history and this book cetainly contained lots of information. I particularly enjoyed the excerpts from earlier writings by travellers to St Kilda from hundreds of years ago and the book answered lots of questions I'd had. However, it did jump around from era to era and I found myself having to refer back to earlier chapters to try to fit what I was reading into a time line.

It was definitely thought provoking and I was both entertained and depressed by trying to imagine what the St Kildans' day to day lives would have been like and what their thoughts might have been.

Well worth buying!