Packy Jim

Skillfully presents and analyzes stories naturally emerging from conversation and expressing a worldview that is both communal and formed by unique life experience. ... Highly recommended."" - Choice

""Draws on interviews with Packy Jim McGrath, a Donegal storyteller who grew up on a smuggling route on the border of the Republic and Northern Ireland."" - Chronicle of Higher Education

""Octogenarian bachelor Packy Jim emerges here as both typical and singular, a barometer of continuity and change. McGrath's resilience, dignity, and strong sense of self manifest clearly in his stories, which locate him both in the technological consumerist future and in the primordial self-sufficient past. Ray Cashman's sharp and sympathetic observation delivers a classic ethnography that stakes a major claim for folkloristic studies as cutting-edge humanities research."" - Lillis Laoire,National University of Ireland–Galway

""A brilliant testament to the ethnographer's art, the deeply rooted wisdom of an 'ordinary' person, and the complex ways in which folklore figures in everyday life along the Irish border."" - James P. Leary, author of Folksongs of Another America