Edward Laxton

Rating: 4* of five, I guess, though less for organization than for effectiveness

This is a non-fictional indictment of the heinous politically engineered, prejudice-motivated famine the English inflicted on the Catholic Irish from 1845-1851. Two and a half million people died or emigrated; Ireland was permanently radicalized; and still the goddamned perps haven't apologized, still less made amends...though, now that I've said that, how would that even be possible? Money won't resurrect the dead.

The book. Yes.

Laxton tells the tale via facts and figures, anecdotes drawn from the documents and media of the day. The unusual facet of this book's focus, for a US audience, is that he uses the Irish ships and the Irish crews as well as the Irish emigrants as the sources. It remains underappreciated, at this distance in time, that the Famine wasn't universal in Ireland; there were Irish who ate and lived as normal even at the lowest depth of the crisis. Laxton tells us the story of the downtrodden, but he does so via the lens of the lucky. He even reminds us that Henry Ford, he of the Ford Motor Company and designer of the Model T, was the son of a Famine emigrant. If not for the hideous, vile, evil people who perpetrated the Famine, the world would not look the way it does today for both good and ill.

There are many period illustrations, facsimilies of documents, and two signatures of lovely color plates reproducing paintings of the ships of the title. The jacket is a Rodney Charman painting of an imagined embarkation from Ireland; his work is all marine-themed painting or drawing, and it is lovely. I'd recommend the book for someone wanting to know factually what happened in a compact telling that doesn't stint on sources or on stories.… (mer)