The Great Hunger: Ireland: 1845-1849

very used condition, spine and cover worn and many pages underlined excessively with blue ink. this should have been a 50 cent bargain bin book…absolute junk

I was a used book, but appeared to never have been read. The dust cover was even in good shape.

This is by far the most complete and best written account of the Great Hunger in Ireland. Woodham-Smith sets forth in heart-wrenching detail the causes, experiences and effects of the great potato blight in the mid 1800s in Ireland. Unflinching in its indictment of the laissez-faire response of British authorities such as Trevelyan and Russell, this thorough history sheds a blinding light on a dark period in this history of this great and troubled nation. If you read only one account of the Hunger, make this the one.

In fall 1972 I was a student traveling around the British Isles with a backpack and a rail pass. Finding myself stuck in Dublin for several days, I bought a copy of this book to while away the time. Previously I'd known of the Potato Famine only as a blessing-in-disguise that drove some of my ancestors to America. This book is rather dry and statistical, but the story it tells is damning. The Potato Famine was traditionally blamed on the laziness of the Irish, who had grown dependent on a single, easy-to-grow crop. Woodham-Smith shows convincingly that the real villains were the British landlords, who were trying to squeeze the maximum profit out of their tenants, and the British government, who denied the magnitude of the problem until it could no longer be concealed and then blamed it on the victims. I found the book engrossing, read it through in a few days, and have reread it several times since. Although it seems short on "human interest," some of the stories the author tells (e.g., the account of famine victims in Skibbereen, Co. Cork) are almost too painful to bear. Perhaps it's just as well that she let the facts and figures speak for themselves; they're horrifying enough!

The BritIrish history establishment has never forgiven Woodham-Smith this watershed book that exposes their cover-up. It took only her few mentions of the British regiments' at-gunpoint removal of Ireland's livestock and grains to end the "perfect" status of history's only "perfect" genocide. By even touching upon the Food Removal this book shatters the "Potato Famine" Big Lie that had ruled for the previous 110 years. Note where the author inserts two math fudges to produce her falsely-low death toll. (After reporting the 1841 official partial recount and how it proved that the 1841 census had undercounted by one-third, the author, nevertheless, used the figure that she knew to be false to lower the death toll [to get published, I am told]). Her fudges yield a death toll of "some 2.5 millions." Once her fudges are removed, her methodology and official figures produce a death toll of 5.16 millions. She also omitted the readily-available identities of each of the 75 Food Removal regiments and the warships convoying the lines of grain ships departing for England. She subtly blows the Irish history establishment's cover-up by complimenting their generosity in blaming the genocide on the potato crop failures and the victims' "fecklessness." This book remains, by far, the most truthful Irish "famine" book ever published. A courageous author! An effective opponent of genocide! A Must Read!