Book Review

This is one of those rare collections that will be of as much interest to the specialist as to the more general reader. Arthur Gribben has assembled a bibliographic introduction and eleven widely ranging yet wonderfully cohesive essays, whose differing angles of vision offer significant new insight on the famine period in Irish history and on the development of the overseas Irish community in North America. Individual essays range in topic from women's experience of the famine as reflected in the Irish oral tradition to one Tory journal's response to the catastrophe, to culinary innovation and famine relief, to the construction of a famine memorial at Canada's Grosse Ile, to United States reportage of the crisis, and to the role of the Irish American press in canonizing particular versions of the famine in the early twentieth century. There is not a weak entry among them, and, despite the collection's eclecticism, the running threads and themes of the essays render this volume a highly manageable, nicely unified study.

1

Two main organizing principles unite the otherwise disparate pieces of scholarship: a thematic commitment to the transnational dimensions of the Irish experience in this era and a methodological focus upon the intersections of social, political, and cultural history. Not every essay displays both characteristics, but one or the other is prominent enough across all eleven pieces to act as a far more effective cement than one has grown accustomed to in collections of this kind.

. . .