Christine Kinealy got it right. Such truths help to heal and hopefully forgive the English and their government for their bad behavior 150 years ago. Never again.

This is a rather pedestrian collection of photos and text covering a century of Irish history that contains some of the most riveting events in an Irish saga never lacking for riveting events. Some of the photos are interesting in that they are unfamiliar to a student of that period of Irish history but the selection overall seemed to me rather dull and not as absorbing as it could or should have been.

The collaborative effort of Sean Sexton (who has been collecting historic photographs of Ireland for thirty years) and Irish historian Christine Kinealy, The Irish: A Photohistory 1840-1940 is an incredible compendium of black-and-white period photographs showcasing Irish individuals, Irish culture, and Irish history. The first photographs are from 1840, a year after the discovery of the photographic process became publicized. These still images vividly capture the desperation and death that marked the Great Potato Famine, severe struggles over land rights and politics, the impact of modernization, and much more, up through approximately 1939 and the beginning of the second world war. The text presents an informative and straightforward account of Irish history, and lends the insight of scholarship to the vividly emotional photographs. The Irish is very highly recommended for personal and community library collections.

It is a false convention as Ms. Kinealy does to blame the misery and death of the famine era on the doctrines of free-market economics. That is the drawback of this otherwise superb study of the period. Big Government -- interventions by the imperial British for purposes both benign and malevolent -- set up and aggravated the disaster, not the Whig government's verbal invocations of free trade. Still, a fine work of research and presentation, though not argumentation.

Corn laws, poor law, treasury. Words like these pop up everywhere in this book. This may not seem noteworthy, as it is a book on the Irish famine, but it is reflective of the author's interest in British government policy to the exclusion of all else. We hear little about how the people suffered or about any cultural aspects of the famine. There are few eyewitness accounts from survivors or outsiders. Even the great emigration of the late 1840's reads like a travel office report. In the end I found this book to be among the most boring I ever picked up.

Kinealy's main argument is that while the British government did try to help ease the famine situation, their efforts were too little too late. Officials wanted Irish money to pay for Irish poverty and relief, and never grasped how serious the whole situation had become. So while they provided considerable aid, it wasn't nearly enough. I think this is a quite reasonable and level headed thesis. It is too bad that it took Kinealy over 300 pages to say it.

As a student of Irish history, and a person of strong nationalist sentiment, I feel somewhat obliged to come to the defense of a valuable historical work that is being ruthlessly slandered. "This Great Calamity," while certainly not alone in the now-expanding field of research Irish Famine, accomplishes its objectives with clarity, scholarship, and an attention to often dismissed or unrecognized primary source material that is truly admirable. There is no history of Ireland, whether by accident or intent, that is not in some way political. This is a simple truth of the field. Within the nationalist sensibility, Chris Fogarty's attention to Britain's role in the mass starvation of the Irish people is to be admired. However, his ill-mannered, poorly-cited, and quite hysterical reviews of several of Christine Kinealy's fine works undermine the very thrust of modern nationalism. As any Irish man or woman might tell you, for too many years the Famine has barely been discussed in Ireland. The pain, the shame, and the widespread loss left a noticeable hole in the scholastic world that has, if only by the grace of Ireland's growing economic prominence and the endevours of historian's such as Kinealy, begun to close. To find the truth of these dark, sad years we must, as a culture that values its past, put aside certain issues and embrace any delving, no matter its angle, into the depths of this period. The historical community aside, Christine Kinealy's work more than earns its place in the library of any open-minded Irish enthusiast or activist. Any Irishmen can tell you the tale as presented by the greats such as Cecil Woodham-Smith, or the epic works of Seamus MacManus, but in the work of Christine Kinealy, the reader is presented with a modern telling of the facts in simple and efficient academic prose. Her facts are correct, her wording unobtrusive (a skill I admittedly lack), and her approach respectfully subjective. She has involved herself in this material, in the lives of these people, both past and present, and she never for a moment shirks her responsibilty when it comes to the implication of wrong, and the attempts to make right, on both sides of the Irish Sea. "This Great Calamity," is as honest, neutral, and academically fulfilling examinations of the Irish Hunger, as one is likely to find anywhere. As a nationalist, I make history my own, ever-recalling and teaching the lesser remembered and often covered-up stories of the Irish past and its less than equal relationship with Britain. However, as a historian I must recognize facts for what they are and celebrate both this work, and its author, for an insightful and well-researched presentation of the darkest days of Irish history.

I came to Christine Kinealy's book with a need to understand the historical facts of the famine years. This work, clearly and without bias, sets out the events and provides considered commentary on the role and motivations of the principal participants be they individuals or goverment. I, unlike Chris Fogarty, have no crude or simplistic agenda.Born in Liverpool, of an Irish father and Liverpool/Irish mother who is descended entirely from survivers of the famine; my interest was to try to fill the shocking void this trauma left in my own city's folk memory as evidenced by the singular lack of stories in my family about those years.

I did not need another emotional polemic. I wanted, and found, an accurate well researched book.Presented with sensitivity, scrupulous attention to detail, and clearly informed by a determination to get to the historical bedrock ,it reveals this tragedy for what it was, and as for Kinealy being an apologist for the role of the British Establishment, read her concluding pragraph. She understands why the British government and its agents acted as they did but in measured tones damns their actions and exposes their self serving motives. After reading this book I understood better what had happened to the parents,wives, children and husbands of many of my forebearers who married in the late 1840's and 1850,s and registered their status as widow or widower. I also understood better why it happened and why Ireland must never again find herself in a position where the destiny of her people is beyond her sovereign control.