The Crofter and the Laird -- John McPhee

<p>When John McPhee returned to the island of his ancestors--Colonsay, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainland--a hundred and thirty-eight people were living there. About eighty of these, crofters and farmers, had familial histories of unbroken residence on the island for two or three hundred years; the rest, including the English laird who owned Colonsay, were incomers. Donald McNeill, the crofter of the title, was working out his existence in this last domain of the feudal system; the laird, the fourth Baron Strathcona, lived in Bath, appeared on Colonsay mainly in the summer, and accepted with nonchalance the fact that he was the least popular man on the island he owned. While comparing crofter and laird, McPhee gives readers a deep and rich portrait of the terrain, the history, the legends, and the people of this fragment of the Hebrides.</p><br><br><b>Author:</b> John McPhee<br><b>Publisher:</b> Farrar, Straus and Giroux<br><b>Published:</b> 09/01/1992<br><b>Pages:</b> 176<br><b>Binding Type:</b> Paperback<br><b>Weight:</b> 0.40lbs<br><b>Size:</b> 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.50d<br><b>ISBN:</b> 9780374514655<br><p><b>About the Author</b><br><p><b>John McPhee</b> was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at <i>Time</i> magazine and led to his long association with <i>The New Yorker</i>, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, <i>A Sense of Wh