Mr. Scanlan’s book is about our collective future as well as the Irish past. It pries the famine’s history away from crude and reductionist political interpretations to ask questions about our own era, in which precariously employed laborers produce export crops so finely tuned genetically as to be susceptible to their own version of blight ... Haunting ... Undoubtedly a history title of the year.
Vigorous and engaging ... Cool but never cold. The book is richly underpinned by research in contemporary sources and firmly rooted in historical scholarship, and it does not fall into the trap of oversimplifying the famine as deliberate genocide. But a proper sense of outrage runs between the lines and carries a consistently high voltage ... Reminds us that the Great Hunger was a very modern event, and one shaped by a mind-set that is now again in the ascendant.
Comprehensive, elegantly written, and heartbreaking ... Seeks to offer a more dialectical and complex story of human errors ... Fascinating in the intricacy of the path it follows.
