Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59445 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-30
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Synopsis
The Irish potato famine of the 1840s, perhaps the most appalling event of the Victorian era, killed over a million people and drove as many more to emigrate to America. It may not have been the result of deliberate government policy, yet British 'obtuseness, short-sightedness and ignorance' - and stubborn commitment to laissez-faire 'solutions' - largely caused the disaster and prevented any serious efforts to relieve suffering. The continuing impact on Anglo-Irish relations was incalculable, the immediate human cost almost inconceivable. In this vivid and disturbing book, Cecil Woodham-Smith provides the definitive account. 'A moving and terrible book. It combines great literary power with great learning. It explains much in modern Ireland - and in modern America' - D.W. Brogan.

Customer Reviews

Quite Simply THE Book on the Irish Famine
Cecil Woodham-Smith was a well respected author and researcher.

Her book covering the famine is arguably the definitive account of the one of the worst times in Ireland's history.

An unanswered question
The book is an impressively researched account of the Great Hunger which covers the tragedy in minute detail. However, there is one significantly important issue which Woodham-Smith fails to answer: when the starving were selling their worldly possesions to get money for food, who was buying them? And how did those who did not die from starvation manage to survive? Were they able to obtain food from alternative sources? Did they grow their own foodstuffs? Was it only families with few children to feed who survived?

A good book but which left one wondering why this issue was not addressed.

An oldie, but...
...a goldie. Somewhat ponderously written (it first appeared in the 1960s), it tells the terrible story of the Famine in Ireland in the late 1840s in which a million Irish died and another million emigrated. It should be remembered that the population of Ireland in 1845 was around 8 million; the current population of Ireland (north and south) is just under 5 million. The Famine had a major effect on history, not only Irish but also world history. It led to the flood of immigrants to the USA, which has left its mark on US society to this day, and it led to the eventual loss of Ireland to the British Crown. Cecil Woodham-Smith tells the story dispassionately, but never in a condemnatory fashion. She lets the reader make up his or her own mind (or shake his or her own head in bewilderment) at things such as the refusal to feed starving people because it would only have made them dependent on charity and less inclined to work. (Such was the super-Thatcherite mentality of the day).