The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-9
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
A landmark work of narrative history, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-9 chronicles one of the most catastrophic humanitarian disasters of the nineteenth century — the Irish Famine — with meticulous scholarship and searing moral clarity. Cecil Woodham-Smith reconstructs the devastating sequence of events that unfolded when the potato blight struck Ireland, wiping out the staple food of millions and triggering mass starvation, disease, and emigration on an almost incomprehensible scale. With unflinching precision, the work details the failures of British government policy, arguing compellingly that political ideology and administrative indifference transformed a natural disaster into a man-made tragedy that claimed over a million lives. Woodham-Smith draws on an extraordinary range of primary sources — letters, government reports, and eyewitness accounts — to give voice to both the suffering of ordinary Irish men and women and the cold calculations of those in power. The result is a profoundly moving yet rigorously authoritative account that remains the definitive popular history of the Famine and its enduring legacy on Irish identity and the Irish diaspora.
Author: Cecil Woodham-Smith
Format: Hardback
Published: 1962, Hamish Hamilton
Genre: British & Irish history
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
A landmark work of narrative history, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-9 chronicles one of the most catastrophic humanitarian disasters of the nineteenth century — the Irish Famine — with meticulous scholarship and searing moral clarity. Cecil Woodham-Smith reconstructs the devastating sequence of events that unfolded when the potato blight struck Ireland, wiping out the staple food of millions and triggering mass starvation, disease, and emigration on an almost incomprehensible scale. With unflinching precision, the work details the failures of British government policy, arguing compellingly that political ideology and administrative indifference transformed a natural disaster into a man-made tragedy that claimed over a million lives. Woodham-Smith draws on an extraordinary range of primary sources — letters, government reports, and eyewitness accounts — to give voice to both the suffering of ordinary Irish men and women and the cold calculations of those in power. The result is a profoundly moving yet rigorously authoritative account that remains the definitive popular history of the Famine and its enduring legacy on Irish identity and the Irish diaspora.