Extraordinarily compelling. The British government and wealthy Irish landowners exacerbated the crop failures that lead to a million deaths and the Irish diaspora. Why, oh why, does the author use cabin" when "cottage" is the preferable term? I'm so glad my gg grandfather Charles Piper got out of Ireland in 1845 and came to Canada." ( )

Gerard Doyle did a fabulous job narrating the audio version. Kelly's book does a fine job detailing the famine years, covering everything from the political to the personal stories. Truly unforgettable. ( )

John Kelly is a worthy successor to David McCullough. This book, heavily annotated and footnoted, is a scholarly work with enough flesh and bones to keep it animated. I love the author's sly ironies. For example, the last line of the book describes the mood of a 1848 New Year's party in England thusly: The famine was over and it had had an expectedly happy ending: the Irish people were learning how to help themselves.

The struggle between the haves and the haves-not is nearly always won by the haves. (Is the moral of the story "get some"?) ( )

I was looking for a relatively short narrative account of the Great Famine to acquire some historical purchase on an event I mostly knew from family folk history. On that scale, this well-written book doesn't disappoint.

Kelly's thesis is that the death of >1 million Irish from hunger and disease was no more a pure Act of God than the destruction of New Orleans in 2005, but was instead a case of a natural crisis exacerbated to catastrophic proportions by political ideology, anti-Irish bigotry, and greed. Specifically, Kelly blames:

1) the greed of Anglo-Irish landlords who responded to the crisis (and increased taxation to support relief efforts) with mass evictions and "emigrant dumping"--i.e. paying the poorest of the poor to emigrate to Canada and the U.S. (comparable to one-way bus tickets to CA for the homeless); and

2) short-sighted, parsimonious relief efforts implemented by British civil servants committed to Malthusian and laissez-faire principles, who:
-refused to "artificially" lower the cost of food below market price lest they interfere with the "natural" workings of the market;
-refused to offer robust aid to the starving Irish lest it foster a culture of "dependency" on government;
-rationalized Irish mass death as a tragic but necessary, natural consequence of the failings of the Irish way of life;
-and seized upon the catastrophe as an exciting opportunity to "morally reeducate" a "backward" people and to modernize its agriculture along capitalist lines.

(Kelly's thesis obviously resonates with Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine about "disaster capitalism.")

Kelly's narrative is especially powerful when it juxtaposes the rationalizations of British capitalists with the unspeakable suffering endured by the victims of famine and government neglect. There are some images here of extreme privation and suffering I will never be able to forget. However, I will point out two problems:

-some of the events he recounts blur the line between history and folk tale (cf. 177, the story of Bridie Sheain which is very powerful, but which is sourced to an "old storyteller" and has the earmarks of legend)

-while I appreciate that the written record probably preserves the perspectives of British observers better than those of illiterate peasants, it bothered me that the narrative individualizes British civil servants while depicting the victims of the famine as an undifferentiated mass. This tends to subtly affirm the Malthusian perspective of the British gov't.

Other, smaller minuses:

-citations are not thorough; when I flipped to the back to find a source of a quotation it was usually quoted second hand from another historian.

-I was able to catch some basic historical errors (e.g. it was John Winthrop, not Jonathan Edwards, who spoke of "a shining city on a hill" [306]) so I suspect there may be others that someone expert on this subject would notice.

On the whole, this is a readable account of a tragic event with lessons for our time, and I recommend it. ( )

This is a very thorough history of the Great Hunger in Ireland, which I will never call the Potato Famine again. A potato blight (throughout Europe) caused the crisis, but the famine was caused by misguided, ideologically driven government policy. Kelly pushes back somewhat against the theory that the famine was a result of a deliberate genocide, but the tale he tells of incompetence and blind ideology is in a way more chilling, because more apt to happen again.
Kelly doesn’t lay down an ideology of his own in the book, but for me it was easy to see disturbing echoes of the 19th century British government in today’s American GOP, with their cynical insistence the “dependence” engendered by any aid to the poor is worse than poverty itself. And as I was reading about the incompetence and mean-spiritedness of Sir Charles Trevelyan, who was held in such high esteem in Britain despite the harm he caused, I heard myself muttering “Heckuva job, Trevvie.” ( )