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Laddar... The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America (1996)av Edward Laxton
   Ingen/inga Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken.  richardderus | Feb 1, 2020 |    ) elsyd | Jul 11, 2015 | inga recensioner | lägg till en recension
Between 1846 and 1851, more than one million people - the famine emigrants - sailed from Ireland to America. Never before had the world witnessed such an exodus. Now, 150 years later, The Famine Ships tells the story of the courage and determination of those who crossed the Atlantic in leaky, overcrowded sailing ships to make new lives for themselves, among them the child Henry Ford and twenty-six-year-old Patrick Kennedy, great-grandfather of John F. Kennedy. Tracing the history of these years, The Famine Ships focuses principally on the poignant individual stories, such as that of a parish priest from Wexford who led eighteen families across the Atlantic and up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to found Wexford, Iowa, where their descendants still live. Edward Laxton conducted five years of research in Ireland and among the immigrants' descendants in the United States and Canada to write this book. Superb color paintings by Rodney Charman, facsimile passenger lists, and reproductions of tickets are among the fascinating memorabilia represented in The Famine Ships. -- "Publisher's description." Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
Pågående diskussionerIngen/ingaPopulära omslag
 Google Books — Laddar...GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973.049162History and Geography North America United States United States Ethnic And National Groups Other Groups Irish AmericansKlassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg: (3.65)
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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. (