Customer Reviews

The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

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I found this work to be a very interesting and informative narrative of 19th century Irish history. It makes the main characters such as O'Connell, Smith-O'Brien, Mitchel and the others appear as real flesh and blood people and is an enthralling read. My only criticism is that there are a number of factual errors which grate and make me wonder if there are other errors which of which I am unaware. For example, Mallow is situated on the River Blackwater not the Lee (p.24), President J.F Kennedy visited Ireland in June 1963 not 1962 (p.548), and when the Irish Free State was set up, three (not two) counties of Ulster, Monaghan, Donegal and Cavan, became part of the new state (p.635). I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about Irish history of the 19th century and I am very grateful to Thomas Keneally for all the work which he has done to bring it so vividly to life.

Independence can be won on the strength of words. Poets and newspapermen as well as politicians and generals lead the fight from Famine to the Eve of Republic.

This book traces the lives and interconnections of the important rebellious men and their families through their stands in Ireland against the conditions they saw, and their understanding of the reasons for it; 'transportation' to Australia, escapes, returns to Ireland or settlement in America. Through it all, the keen interest in conditions 'back home', and their attempts to influence it. If you have wanted to understand the relationship between the Irish Diaspora, America, Australia, and Ireland, and the depth of feelings and distrust between the Irish and the English, this is the place to start.

This book first caught my attention, as this is the Author who penned what has become a classic both in book and movie form, "Schindler's List". The book also was to explain much about the Australian aspect of the Irish Diaspora that was a facet I had not read about. My Great-Grandfather came to the US and his Brother went to Australia, so there was personal interest as well.

The book is sweeping in many respects, its length, the time in History it covers, and the meticulous research that must have been required in its creation. The beauty of the work is it can be read as a major Historical Work or if the reader prefers, a 19th Century novel.

I found the writing to be very dense requiring more time than I normally would take to read such a book. There is so much information that if much of it is new and you wish to really get your mind around it, it requires a good deal of time. I actually read the book in parts and took time to put in to perspective what I had read. This book is probably about double the length or even more than that of the average book today, but don't deny yourself a great read because it takes two hands to carry.

Irish History is not the material that makes for many happy endings. Another reviewer mused about what they would think of this book in England, I think it would be hard to find on a bookshelf! The History of and the time that brackets The Great Famine is as grim as any human suffering you have read before. The English landlords behavior was atrocious and this book pulls no punches in that regard. The Author also talks about some of the more unsavory groups that operated in Ireland and often found themselves on a ship to the other side of the world. To the Author's credit he does not dwell, he recounts History and it's left to the reader to draw conclusions. Someone else wrote there were some factual errors and they appear well informed. I don't believe they are detrimental to the work or its merit, they are worth knowing for historical accuracy.

Whether you are Irish or not the book is time well spent. At the conclusion you will be sorry it's over, but I always take that as a sign it was a great read. And as someone once said "there are no Irish stories with happy endings". This book may not be uplifting in the traditional sense, but as present developments in the news are showing that saying may yet be proven wrong. Ireland is doing very well as it enters the 21st Century, and some of the descendents of those who were forced to leave, are now returning.

As the Diaspora Descendents returns, and Ireland flourishes, that would be the happiest ending of all.

The story of what happened to the Irish political prisoners known as the Young Irelanders and the Fenians, in the 1850s and 60s, is expertly told by Australian writer Thomas Keneally in "The Great Shame." Sticking firmly to documented history, about the only thing Keneally leaves out is the nastier side of Fenianism, with its secret vendettas and occasional underlying brutality. But that all lies in the misty past, and Keneally has done a first-rate job of bringing much of this truculent history out into the light.

This is an epic journey, just as the formation of the Irish diaspora needs it to be. You never quite know where you are you going to go next, as ships sail back and forth from Ireland to Australia and from Australia to the Americas. It is the roaring days of sail just before steam, and gold is being discovered right and left on both sides of the Pacific, sufficient to lend impetus to various Fenian schemes through goldfields' fundraising.

One of the characters involved in the 50s was a man destined to become an American Civil War hero with the rank of general. He fought on the Union side while another Irishman who had fought the same battle as he had at home in Ireland, and had also been transported for it, fought with the Confederates. Such were the fortunes of war at that time.

The book also recounts how the Fenian forces tried on three occasions, prior to Confederation, to invade Canada in order to hurt the British in North America. They also had the long-term plan of mounting an invasion of Ireland from a Canadian base. It was all a bit pathetic in the end, but for a time, it was in deadly earnest and who could have said what the result might not have been had the Fenian forces succeeded.

Perhaps the most interesting part of a very entertaining book is the retelling of an attempted rescue from Western Australia of the last group of Fenian "lifers," all soldiers who had been cashiered from the British Army for their part in Fenian plots in England and Ireland. These men had little hope of ever leaving their prison, and were mostly ailing by the time American Fenians had raised the enormous sum needed to buy a ship to go to their rescue. The hair-raising tale of what happened is one of the nineteenth century's best adventure stories, and Keneally relishes the telling of it.

So this is a book which has everything an Irishman, or an Irishman at heart, could wish for. I wonder what the reaction of the English might be to such a tale. The evidence is somewhat damning, to the effect that political repression of the most odious kind was used during and after the famine. Of course, this is only referring to the nineteenth century and does not go back in any detail to the awful story of Cromwell's men or even earlier, which might lead one to think that the English, when they came to Ireland, only did so to practice.

If you've got any Irish blood in you, (and if you didn't previously know one way or the other, this may prove to be a glorious occasion for finding out) you'll fairly quickly be learning to say the old war cry, Erin go bragh. Ireland forever! It's a strange tale and one that should make us reflect about the nature of power and its misuse. It all seems so long ago now but that's just a mirage of sorts, for it was really only just the other day.

Lastly I should point out that writing a book like this must have been a sheer delight. Keneally seems to have visited many of the sites he talks about and they are often in out of the way places. I imagine that it was an absolute pleasure for him to write a book like this and I look forward to the day when he finds time to do it again. I can't recommend "The Great Shame" highly enough.

Keneally's book is powerful...the chapters on the Famine almost brought tears to my eyes. I especially enjoyed the chapters on Thomas Francis Meagher, who is a "not-so-distant relative" of mine! I had heard a few stories about him in the Civil War but this was the first time I actually read anything about him!

I would reccomend it to anyone wanting to learn about the history of the Irish, in particularly of those who "found themselves in Van Diemen's Land". But also students of Common Law and the Constitution might want to read it for the Draconian laws the British imposed on the Irish (e.g."imprisonment for even thinking aloud that the British Empire might be overthrown someday").

It is lengthy but well worth the time to take to read it...the illustrations and photos are wonderful too and really aid in picturing the details of the times.

In this book Keneally proves that he can write factual historical narrative with the same pace, colour and immediacy that make his treatment of serious themes in novels so compelling. Here the subject is the transportation - legally and physically - of Irish nationalism to Australia and the United States in the nineteenth century. Keneally does not attempt a history of that nationalism itself, but rather, through illustration of the lives, adventures and intellectual development of three successive generations of nationalists, portrays the nature of the experience of repression and resistance in Ireland, and of forced exile and ultimately triumph in Australia and the United States. In the first section of the book Hugh Larkin, a forefather of Keneally's own wife, stands as a representative of the thousands who suffered early in the century for their inarticulate and disorganised resentment of their serf-like status. The careful reconstruction of the brutal sequence by which Larkin was torn from hearth and home, and deposited unprepared in the Australian Bush, and by which his family was sundered, is rendered all the more chilling by the tone of legal correctness that informed the entire inhuman process. It is a theme dealt with on a much wider canvas by Robert Hughes in "The Fatal Shore", but never with such poignancy as the treatment of this individual case evokes. One finishes the book still haunted by the disappearance of Larkin's abandoned wife into the "nacht und nebel" of post-Famine Ireland. The fate of the leaders of Young Ireland, the naively idealistic movement doomed by that same Famine dominates the second part of the book - and it is one filled with moral ambiguities and dilemmas. The nominal leader, Smith-O'Brien, comes across as self-important, pompous and ultimately irrelevant but his allies Meagher and Mitchell are full-blooded personalities too extravagant for any fiction. Their individual escapes from Australia to the United States are the preliminaries to passionate involvement in the politics and battlefields of the Civil War. The attitudes of these erstwhile defenders of Irish freedom to the Slavery issue are fascinating - Meagher, ambiguous, even unsympathetic, but heroically leading the Irish 69th Regiment into bloodbaths at Antietem, Fredricksburg and Chancellorsville while Mitchell, a convert to Southern values, sacrificing his family and his freedom for the Confederate cause and ending in chains alongside Jefferson Davis himself. Meagher's association with characters such as Dan Sickles and William Walker (of Nicaragua filibustering fame), and his later adventures in Montana, are worth a book in their own right (he does feature in Jeff Sharra's "Gods and Generals"). The final section of ""The Great Shame" represents the link with our own era, detailing the rise, temporary fall and ultimate survival of the Fenians and of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the movement that would be ultimately decisive in achieving Irish independence. Complex personalities - if more focussed and ruthless than in earlier generations - abound here also and the account of the rescue of Fenian prisoners from Western Australia by a specially chartered New England whaler in the 1870's is the stuff of the highest drama. The personal oddessy of John Boyle O'Reilly, cavalry trooper turned revolutionary, who reflected the experience of prison, transportation and escape in his writing and ultimately emerged as a pillar of the Boston literary establishment, is both surprising and inspiring - one yearns to know yet more abut this attractive personality.

This is a work one races through, and hopes will never end. Keneally's novelist's feel for telling detail and the revealing phrase explains more about the Irish experience than any bloodless academic history of recent years. Most of the story is tragic but the sense of the indomitability, generosity and nobility of the human spirit balances the squalor, the cruelty and the oppression so that the final effect is of inspiration. The subject may be nationalism but the underlying theme is the greatness of humanity itself. In summary it is a wonderful book - perhaps Keneally's best. If you read nothing else this year, read this.

Thomas Keneally looks into his own family history, and ends up setting forth the fascinating story of Young Ireland, one of the most neglected periods of Irish history. With his great eye for detail and beautiful imagery, Keneally relates the story of such Irish legends as William Smith O'Brien, Thomas Meagher and John Mitchel. "The Great Shame" brings the lives of these and the other Irish legends of the time to vivid life, following them from their roots in Ireland, to their exile in Van Diemen's Land, and culminating in their glorious rebirth in Civil War America. Read this book!

Empires aren't built by armies and navies, but by those who settle in new places, performing the daily tasks that establish a new nation. Keneally reminds us that the Irish Diaspora sent waves of unwilling individuals and families to 'new' lands in North America and Australia. The Great Plains of North America remained grasslands free of the plow. The great gold fields of California and Australia were some years away. Transcontinental railroads in Australia and North America, which would employ many Irish workers, were a remote dream. Driven or transported from their failing farms, the Irish had little but work as farm laborers, domestic service or, with luck, establishment as small shopkeepers to look forward to as they fled the Blight.

As a writer of many works of historical fiction, Keneally's endowed with a superior talent for depicting real people in true to life situations. He's fictionalized Australia's Patrick White, television personality Gordon Elliot and Aborigine rebel Jimmy Gouvernor. Who else could successfully portray his own and his wife's grandfathers in fiction and history? In Great Shame he's able to track the movements of Hugh Larkin and other Keneally family members with his engaging writing style. Indeed, in telling a story he is without peer in the English idiom.

Amazon's readers will be particularly interested in this book, particularly given the position of Irish exiles in the Civil War. John Mitchell's support of slavery and the Confederacy remains enigmatic, especially in view of England being the South's most active ally. Meagher's role in the West and the war is highly detailed and makes captivating reading.

The real appeal of this book is not just the story of the Irish, but the quest for justice. The Diaspora was driven by a ruling nation refusing to face the realities of their inaction in the face of all evidence. The exiles, both forced and willing, never lost sight of the dream of an Ireland free from the yoke of a foreign invader. Even through the decades of oppression and continuing agricultural disaster, Irishmen sought freedom and sovereignty. The most telling statement in this book is found in the very last page where Keneally reminds us that the population of Ireland at the establishment of the Free State was just over half of what it had been at the onset of the Blight nearly eighty years before. Anyone feeling weary from the failure to achieve a peaceful settlement to the 'Irish question' must keep this grim statistic in mind. It underlies many of the attitudes held by the Irish in today's politics. Don't buy and read this book because you're Irish; do it to understand how easy it is to overlook injustice and the long term impact on its victims.

All this said, neither Keneally nor we submitting to these pages can ignore the greatest injustice of empire building - the forced displacement or eradication of the indigenous peoples. Keneally has addressed that issue elsewhere and again in his peerless style.

Keneally's book will be a classic.He has captured the Irish Diaspora as none could do better.This is a huge story covering time,places, politics,love,hate,family,oppression,wars,peace;but through it all the determination of a race to survive.
Keneally writes so well that he makes it seem that he was right there all the time and that you are travelling right along with him.
Even the Irish ,however you want to define what is Irish,will find that the spread and influence of the Irish is far greater than ever realized.
After so many other's attempts it took an Australian of Keneally's stature to write the story so well.
So many resort to fiction to tell a story,but Keneally tells the story magnificently and does it with facts.

Thomas Keneally's The Great Shame was very well documented and extremely detailed and vivid but twice as long as many contemporary histories (605 pages of text). A commitment is needed to follow the story of the Ribbonmen, Fenians and the Young Ireland Movement; the trial of William Smith O'Brien; the deportation of political prisoners to Australia; the amazing story of General Thomas Meagher of the US Union army; and the sad story of John Michell, a Confederate.