Rating: 
Summary: Did you know this book has a different title in the UK?
Review: An incidental fact:My copy of this book (bought in the UK) is called "The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New". Do you not think it is interesting that the real title of this book (ie. the "triumph" of the Irish in the English-speaking world") says a lot about the continuing ambivalence of modern-day English people to the Irish? Clearly the true title of the book is too provocative for English tastes. I believe this says a lot about the message of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Did you know this book has a different title in the UK?
Review: An incidental fact: My copy of this book (bought in the UK) is called "The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New". Do you not think it is interesting that the real title of this book (ie. the "triumph" of the Irish in the English-speaking world") says a lot about the continuing ambivalence of modern-day English people to the Irish? Clearly the true title of the book is too provocative for English tastes. I believe this says a lot about the message of this book.
Rating:
Summary: A quest for justice
Review: Empires aren't built by armies and navies, but by those who settle in new places, performing the daily tasks that establish a new nation. Keneally reminds us that the Irish Diaspora sent waves of unwilling individuals and families to 'new' lands in North America and Australia. The Great Plains of North America remained grasslands free of the plow. The great gold fields of California and Australia were some years away. Transcontinental railroads in Australia and North America, which would employ many Irish workers, were a remote dream. Driven or transported from their failing farms, the Irish had little but work as farm laborers, domestic service or, with luck, establishment as small shopkeepers to look forward to as they fled the Blight. As a writer of many works of historical fiction, Keneally's endowed with a superior talent for depicting real people in true to life situations. He's fictionalized Australia's Patrick White, television personality Gordon Elliot and Aborigine rebel Jimmy Gouvernor. Who else could successfully portray his own and his wife's grandfathers in fiction and history? In Great Shame he's able to track the movements of Hugh Larkin and other Keneally family members with his engaging writing style. Indeed, in telling a story he is without peer in the English idiom. Amazon's readers will be particularly interested in this book, particularly given the position of Irish exiles in the Civil War. John Mitchell's support of slavery and the Confederacy remains enigmatic, especially in view of England being the South's most active ally. Meagher's role in the West and the war is highly detailed and makes captivating reading. The real appeal of this book is not just the story of the Irish, but the quest for justice. The Diaspora was driven by a ruling nation refusing to face the realities of their inaction in the face of all evidence. The exiles, both forced and willing, never lost sight of the dream of an Ireland free from the yoke of a foreign invader. Even through the decades of oppression and continuing agricultural disaster, Irishmen sought freedom and sovereignty. The most telling statement in this book is found in the very last page where Keneally reminds us that the population of Ireland at the establishment of the Free State was just over half of what it had been at the onset of the Blight nearly eighty years before. Anyone feeling weary from the failure to achieve a peaceful settlement to the 'Irish question' must keep this grim statistic in mind. It underlies many of the attitudes held by the Irish in today's politics. Don't buy and read this book because you're Irish; do it to understand how easy it is to overlook injustice and the long term impact on its victims. All this said, neither Keneally nor we submitting to these pages can ignore the greatest injustice of empire building - the forced displacement or eradication of the indigenous peoples. Keneally has addressed that issue elsewhere and again in his peerless style.
Rating:
Summary: A book for all Irish-Australians
Review: I am Irish Australian and like Thomas Keneally and his children, my ancestors were forced to leave Ireland and start a new life in Australia. As I have become older, and living now in the UK, I have become increasingly interested in what led my ancestors to come to Australia. I think Keneally has been struck by this thought as well - how did we become who we are? When you are descended from convicts, you find yourself wondering how life might have been different if they had not been deported - equally, you realise how lucky you are that as a consequence, you happen to have been born in one of the best places in the world. The British did not realise what a blessing they were bestowing upon us! This book is not just a book about the Irish experience in Australia - it is more profoundly a history of Ireland itself. The Irish story, however, is much more than the potato famine or the rise of Sinn Fein or the Battle of the Boyne - it is also the lives led by its citizens, both in Ireland and abroad. To be Irish was a very special thing indeed, even though in most cases, this meant in fact that you were treated with suspicion and disdain. The story of men and women such as Hugh Larkin deported to Australia for standing up for the families and land, is sadly common, even banal. But such people they were! I admire them so much for their fortitude and courage and this book is a tribute to them. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like to have been forcefully removed from your families in those days of no telephones, faxes, planes - life truly meant life and those men and women left Ireland with little hope that they would ever be able to return. I have a small story to tell that helps put it all in context. My grandmother (sadly deceased) told us how when she was a child growing up in the Queensland bush in 1900, her aged father (not the convict! ) would ask her to sing, late in the evening at the barndances held at their farm, all the Irish songs to him and his cronies in the district who were all homesick for Ireland. The song the old men loved most, apparently, was "I'll take you home again Kathleen". The yearning for home was so deep for all of them. Kenneally is a great Australian and I never enjoy his work more than when his sharp eyes and lyrical words are focused upon our country and the people who have made it what it is today. One of these days, Keneally will win the Nobel Prize, I am sure of it. He is a genial man and the love of his subject-matter shines through this extraordinary work. I thoroughly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A book for all Irish-Australians
Review: I am Irish Australian and like Thomas Keneally and his children, my ancestors were forced to leave Ireland and start a new life in Australia. As I have become older, and living now in the UK, I have become increasingly interested in what led my ancestors to come to Australia. I think Keneally has been struck by this thought as well - how did we become who we are? When you are descended from convicts, you find yourself wondering how life might have been different if they had not been deported - equally, you realise how lucky you are that as a consequence, you happen to have been born in one of the best places in the world. The British did not realise what a blessing they were bestowing upon us! This book is not just a book about the Irish experience in Australia - it is more profoundly a history of Ireland itself. The Irish story, however, is much more than the potato famine or the rise of Sinn Fein or the Battle of the Boyne - it is also the lives led by its citizens, both in Ireland and abroad. To be Irish was a very special thing indeed, even though in most cases, this meant in fact that you were treated with suspicion and disdain. The story of men and women such as Hugh Larkin deported to Australia for standing up for the families and land, is sadly common, even banal. But such people they were! I admire them so much for their fortitude and courage and this book is a tribute to them. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like to have been forcefully removed from your families in those days of no telephones, faxes, planes - life truly meant life and those men and women left Ireland with little hope that they would ever be able to return. I have a small story to tell that helps put it all in context. My grandmother (sadly deceased) told us how when she was a child growing up in the Queensland bush in 1900, her aged father (not the convict! ) would ask her to sing, late in the evening at the barndances held at their farm, all the Irish songs to him and his cronies in the district who were all homesick for Ireland. The song the old men loved most, apparently, was "I'll take you home again Kathleen". The yearning for home was so deep for all of them. Kenneally is a great Australian and I never enjoy his work more than when his sharp eyes and lyrical words are focused upon our country and the people who have made it what it is today. One of these days, Keneally will win the Nobel Prize, I am sure of it. He is a genial man and the love of his subject-matter shines through this extraordinary work. I thoroughly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: An interesting and entertaining tale of the Irish diaspora
Review: I found this work to be a very interesting and informative narrative of 19th century Irish history. It makes the main characters such as O'Connell, Smith-O'Brien, Mitchel and the others appear as real flesh and blood people and is an enthralling read. My only criticism is that there are a number of factual errors which grate and make me wonder if there are other errors which of which I am unaware. For example, Mallow is situated on the River Blackwater not the Lee (p.24), President J.F Kennedy visited Ireland in June 1963 not 1962 (p.548), and when the Irish Free State was set up, three (not two) counties of Ulster, Monaghan, Donegal and Cavan, became part of the new state (p.635). I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about Irish history of the 19th century and I am very grateful to Thomas Keneally for all the work which he has done to bring it so vividly to life.
Rating:
Summary: If you read nothing else this year, read this!
Review: In this book Keneally proves that he can write factual historical narrative with the same pace, colour and immediacy that make his treatment of serious themes in novels so compelling. Here the subject is the transportation - legally and physically - of Irish nationalism to Australia and the United States in the nineteenth century. Keneally does not attempt a history of that nationalism itself, but rather, through illustration of the lives, adventures and intellectual development of three successive generations of nationalists, portrays the nature of the experience of repression and resistance in Ireland, and of forced exile and ultimately triumph in Australia and the United States. In the first section of the book Hugh Larkin, a forefather of Keneally's own wife, stands as a representative of the thousands who suffered early in the century for their inarticulate and disorganised resentment of their serf-like status. The careful reconstruction of the brutal sequence by which Larkin was torn from hearth and home, and deposited unprepared in the Australian Bush, and by which his family was sundered, is rendered all the more chilling by the tone of legal correctness that informed the entire inhuman process. It is a theme dealt with on a much wider canvas by Robert Hughes in "The Fatal Shore", but never with such poignancy as the treatment of this individual case evokes. One finishes the book still haunted by the disappearance of Larkin's abandoned wife into the "nacht und nebel" of post-Famine Ireland. The fate of the leaders of Young Ireland, the naively idealistic movement doomed by that same Famine dominates the second part of the book - and it is one filled with moral ambiguities and dilemmas. The nominal leader, Smith-O'Brien, comes across as self-important, pompous and ultimately irrelevant but his allies Meagher and Mitchell are full-blooded personalities too extravagant for any fiction. Their individual escapes from Australia to the United States are the preliminaries to passionate involvement in the politics and battlefields of the Civil War. The attitudes of these erstwhile defenders of Irish freedom to the Slavery issue are fascinating - Meagher, ambiguous, even unsympathetic, but heroically leading the Irish 69th Regiment into bloodbaths at Antietem, Fredricksburg and Chancellorsville while Mitchell, a convert to Southern values, sacrificing his family and his freedom for the Confederate cause and ending in chains alongside Jefferson Davis himself. Meagher's association with characters such as Dan Sickles and William Walker (of Nicaragua filibustering fame), and his later adventures in Montana, are worth a book in their own right (he does feature in Jeff Sharra's "Gods and Generals"). The final section of ""The Great Shame" represents the link with our own era, detailing the rise, temporary fall and ultimate survival of the Fenians and of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the movement that would be ultimately decisive in achieving Irish independence. Complex personalities - if more focussed and ruthless than in earlier generations - abound here also and the account of the rescue of Fenian prisoners from Western Australia by a specially chartered New England whaler in the 1870's is the stuff of the highest drama. The personal oddessy of John Boyle O'Reilly, cavalry trooper turned revolutionary, who reflected the experience of prison, transportation and escape in his writing and ultimately emerged as a pillar of the Boston literary establishment, is both surprising and inspiring - one yearns to know yet more abut this attractive personality. This is a work one races through, and hopes will never end. Keneally's novelist's feel for telling detail and the revealing phrase explains more about the Irish experience than any bloodless academic history of recent years. Most of the story is tragic but the sense of the indomitability, generosity and nobility of the human spirit balances the squalor, the cruelty and the oppression so that the final effect is of inspiration. The subject may be nationalism but the underlying theme is the greatness of humanity itself. In summary it is a wonderful book - perhaps Keneally's best. If you read nothing else this year, read this.
Rating:
Summary: If you read nothing else this year, read this!
Review: In this book Keneally proves that he can write factual historical narrative with the same pace, colour and immediacy that make his treatment of serious themes in novels so compelling. Here the subject is the transportation - legally and physically - of Irish nationalism to Australia and the United States in the nineteenth century. Keneally does not attempt a history of that nationalism itself, but rather, through illustration of the lives, adventures and intellectual development of three successive generations of nationalists, portrays the nature of the experience of repression and resistance in Ireland, and of forced exile and ultimately triumph in Australia and the United States. In the first section of the book Hugh Larkin, a forefather of Keneally's own wife, stands as a representative of the thousands who suffered early in the century for their inarticulate and disorganised resentment of their serf-like status. The careful reconstruction of the brutal sequence by which Larkin was torn from hearth and home, and deposited unprepared in the Australian Bush, and by which his family was sundered, is rendered all the more chilling by the tone of legal correctness that informed the entire inhuman process. It is a theme dealt with on a much wider canvas by Robert Hughes in "The Fatal Shore", but never with such poignancy as the treatment of this individual case evokes. One finishes the book still haunted by the disappearance of Larkin's abandoned wife into the "nacht und nebel" of post-Famine Ireland. The fate of the leaders of Young Ireland, the naively idealistic movement doomed by that same Famine dominates the second part of the book - and it is one filled with moral ambiguities and dilemmas. The nominal leader, Smith-O'Brien, comes across as self-important, pompous and ultimately irrelevant but his allies Meagher and Mitchell are full-blooded personalities too extravagant for any fiction. Their individual escapes from Australia to the United States are the preliminaries to passionate involvement in the politics and battlefields of the Civil War. The attitudes of these erstwhile defenders of Irish freedom to the Slavery issue are fascinating - Meagher, ambiguous, even unsympathetic, but heroically leading the Irish 69th Regiment into bloodbaths at Antietem, Fredricksburg and Chancellorsville while Mitchell, a convert to Southern values, sacrificing his family and his freedom for the Confederate cause and ending in chains alongside Jefferson Davis himself. Meagher's association with characters such as Dan Sickles and William Walker (of Nicaragua filibustering fame), and his later adventures in Montana, are worth a book in their own right (he does feature in Jeff Sharra's "Gods and Generals"). The final section of ""The Great Shame" represents the link with our own era, detailing the rise, temporary fall and ultimate survival of the Fenians and of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the movement that would be ultimately decisive in achieving Irish independence. Complex personalities - if more focussed and ruthless than in earlier generations - abound here also and the account of the rescue of Fenian prisoners from Western Australia by a specially chartered New England whaler in the 1870's is the stuff of the highest drama. The personal oddessy of John Boyle O'Reilly, cavalry trooper turned revolutionary, who reflected the experience of prison, transportation and escape in his writing and ultimately emerged as a pillar of the Boston literary establishment, is both surprising and inspiring - one yearns to know yet more abut this attractive personality. This is a work one races through, and hopes will never end. Keneally's novelist's feel for telling detail and the revealing phrase explains more about the Irish experience than any bloodless academic history of recent years. Most of the story is tragic but the sense of the indomitability, generosity and nobility of the human spirit balances the squalor, the cruelty and the oppression so that the final effect is of inspiration. The subject may be nationalism but the underlying theme is the greatness of humanity itself. In summary it is a wonderful book - perhaps Keneally's best. If you read nothing else this year, read this.
Rating:
Summary: Good telling of modern English/Irish history
Review: Independence can be won on the strength of words. Poets and newspapermen as well as politicians and generals lead the fight from Famine to the Eve of Republic. This book traces the lives and interconnections of the important rebellious men and their families through their stands in Ireland against the conditions they saw, and their understanding of the reasons for it; 'transportation' to Australia, escapes, returns to Ireland or settlement in America. Through it all, the keen interest in conditions 'back home', and their attempts to influence it. If you have wanted to understand the relationship between the Irish Diaspora, America, Australia, and Ireland, and the depth of feelings and distrust between the Irish and the English, this is the place to start.
Rating:
Summary: Simply put: A GREAT WORK!
Review: Keneally's book is powerful...the chapters on the Famine almost brought tears to my eyes. I especially enjoyed the chapters on Thomas Francis Meagher, who is a "not-so-distant relative" of mine! I had heard a few stories about him in the Civil War but this was the first time I actually read anything about him! I would reccomend it to anyone wanting to learn about the history of the Irish, in particularly of those who "found themselves in Van Diemen's Land". But also students of Common Law and the Constitution might want to read it for the Draconian laws the British imposed on the Irish (e.g."imprisonment for even thinking aloud that the British Empire might be overthrown someday"). It is lengthy but well worth the time to take to read it...the illustrations and photos are wonderful too and really aid in picturing the details of the times.
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