Irish Hunger: Exploring the Legacy of the Potato Famine

by Tom Hayden

Book Overview

In Irish Hunger, renowned Irish and Irish-American contributors-actors and activists, poets and journalists, politician and historian-offer moving commentaries and modern perspectives on the events of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570982333
• ISBN13: 9781570982330
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Roberts Rinehart Publishers
• Length: 295 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent!!!

Being Irish, I have long been interested in the Great Famine which destroyed a third of Ireland's population. This book is unlike anything I have ever come across: these essays insist that the famine cannot be studied as an isolated historical event, such as the Great Depression, or a war. Rather, the famine is seen as the end of a civilization, of an entire culture. A better anaology would be to compare it to the destruction of the Aztecs; what once existed was gone forever and to be replaced by a new order. Pre-famine Irish were gaelic speaking peasants who enjoyed an oral culture. There is almost nothing left of these people - the Irish museums have no artifacts, no written accounts. Nothing survived of these people, and what we do know about the famine comes largely from the observations of dispassionate English politicians. This books examines how the famine has become deeply woven into the Irish psyche; how it has become a part of the Irish collective consciousness and has shaped all that has transpired since. This is truly a novel approach, and one that I found to be very compelling. This is a book to be owned.

Beginner's Guide to the Famine

Here is a collection of essays by Irish men and women (as well as Irish-Americans) edited by Tom Hayden that accomplish a number of tasks:* Giving historical information about the famine * Describing how it affected their families * And saying how they will move on knowingly It includes people such as Gabriel Byrne, Jimmy Breslin to Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney. It isn't the definitive historical work on either Irish history (in general) or the Famine (in particular). It is, though, a good starting place.