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The Irish Famine - A Documentary (Paperback, New Ed) Loot Price: R365
Discovery Miles 3 650
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The Irish Famine - A Documentary (Paperback, New Ed): Colm Toibin, Diarmaid Ferriter

The Irish Famine - A Documentary (Paperback, New Ed)

Colm Toibin, Diarmaid Ferriter

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List price R437 Loot Price R365 Discovery Miles 3 650 You Save R72 (16%)

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Booker shortlistee Toibin (The Blackwater Lightship, 2000, etc.) collaborates with historian Ferriter (Dublin City Univ.) to introduce and annotate contemporary documents from Ireland's devastating mid-19th-century famine. This is not yet another ringing indictment of Britain for solely inflicting the "Great Hunger" that ravaged Ireland for nearly a decade beginning with the onset of a potato blight in 1845. That notion, claims Toibin in his prefatory essay, was abandoned decades ago by serious Irish historians. Instead, he presses the question of why Irish intellectuals and literati often seem reluctant to delve into a disaster whose causes were as complex as its results were tragic. Toibin's suggestion: the degree of profiteering engaged in by landholding and mercantile Irish, even as they witnessed the decimation of the poor among them, remains difficult for many to confront. The Ferriter-collected documents do contain, however, ample testimony to the role British incompetence, ethnic hatred, religious bias, and sheer inhumanity played in the administration's approach to what became more of an "Irish" problem as it deepened. Factions in both countries found in the famine an opportunity to effect the "removal" of one-quarter or more of the Irish population through forced eviction from small holdings, with subsequent emigration as the only alternative for most to starvation or its companion ravages of disease. The collected letters, public postings, journalism, speeches, etc., summon both fact and emotion: personal accounts often resonate with agony but also chilling understatement of one of the great human tragedies on record by those forced to deal directly with it. They can still leave a reader room, the authors suggest, to agree with John Mitchel (1861) that "the almighty sent the potato blight but Britain caused the famine," or to conclude as well, writes Toibin, that "the Irish merchant classes and middlemen made a fortune out of the Famine . . . on the ruins of the smallholding class." Socioeconomic surgery on a national scale, with no anesthetic. (Kirkus Reviews)

This unique volume, comprising Colm Toibin's acclaimed short text and a linked collection of key documents put together by one of Ireland's leading younger historians, offers a many-sided view of one's of history's most poignant and far-reaching catastrophes. This book will allow the reader to understand the complex way in which the fragmentary past is both available to us ... and distant from us.' We get those insights from Toibin's short history and from a rich collection of documents -- government papers, recipes, journalism, letters, statistics, personal statements, all linked so the book can be read as a whole.

General

Imprint: Profile Books Ltd
Country of origin: United Kingdom
Release date: September 2004
First published: 2009
Authors: Colm Toibin • Diarmaid Ferriter
Dimensions: 200 x 130 x 18mm (L x W x T)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Edition: New Ed
ISBN-13: 978-1-86197-460-0
Categories: Books > Humanities > History > British & Irish history > 1700 to 1900
Books > History > British & Irish history > 1700 to 1900
LSN: 1-86197-460-4
Barcode: 9781861974600

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