Customer Reviews

Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine

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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.