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Rating: 
Summary: Thoroughly researched account that paints a complete picture
Review: A good book to read on the subject if you you're looking for a single text on the subject of the Irish Potato Famine. I do appreciate the technical and fact filled nature of Smith's writing. What it lacks in specific details on human suffering it makes up for with detailed accounts on the conditions and players that led to this tragedy. This book covers the political and cultural environments of the time as well as the greater effect the famine had on Ireland and the rest of the world. I came away from the book with a clearer picture of the relationship between Ireland and England, and a better understanding of the role each country (and their populations, press, government officials, landowners, farmers and royalty) played.
Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly researched account that paints a complete picture
Review: A good book to read on the subject if you you're looking for a single text on the subject of the Irish Potato Famine. I do appreciate the technical and fact filled nature of Smith's writing. What it lacks in specific details on human suffering it makes up for with detailed accounts on the conditions and players that led to this tragedy. This book covers the political and cultural environments of the time as well as the greater effect the famine had on Ireland and the rest of the world. I came away from the book with a clearer picture of the relationship between Ireland and England, and a better understanding of the role each country (and their populations, press, government officials, landowners, farmers and royalty) played.
Rating: 
Summary: A detailed and heart-breaking history
Review: One would be pressed to call "The Great Hunger" an easy read. Written in 1964, its style and dense recitation of facts can leave the reader mired in detail.Yet through the often thick prose comes a shocking tale of human disaster on an enormous scale. The near-total reliance of the Irish on the potato leads to calamity when that crop is destroyed by blight in the mid-1840's. Beholding to their landlords (many of them absentee), virtually penniless, they are swept into a vortex of helplessness and starvation. While local officials in Ireland realise with horror the consequences of the crop failure, government bureaucrats in London stubbornly insist it would be wrong to send massive food relief because it would undermine free enterprise. The author quotes extensively from numerous first hand accounts which graphically describe the suffering and despair of the Irish peasantry. The book however is not limited to the tragedy that took place in Ireland. Woodham-Smith relates how thousands of Irish, many of them ill with typhus, flee their homeland for North America. Many of the vessels are poorly equipped and provisioned, and their cargo is human misery. One of the most appalling chapters deals with the scene at Grosse Isle, Quebec, where a small fever hospital is overrun by sick and dying immigrants. At one point in the summer of 1847, dozens of ships are moored in the St. Lawrence River, waiting to discharge their gravely-ill passengers. The line of vessels stretches several miles. The deaths number in the thousands. This is just one of many compelling images which emerge from Woodham-Smith's history, and they more than compensate for the often complex and detailed way he presents his information. A worthwhile companion book to "The Great Hunger" is the novel "Away" by Jane Urquhart, which traces the journey of an Irish family from the Isle of Rathlin off the north coast of Ireland, to the Canadian province of Ontario, during the potato famine.
Rating: 
Summary: A thoroughly appalling, if rather dry, story
Review: The BritIrish history establishment has never forgiven Woodham-Smith this watershed book that exposes their cover-up. It took only her few mentions of the British regiments' at-gunpoint removal of Ireland's livestock and grains to end the "perfect" status of history's only "perfect" genocide. By even touching upon the Food Removal this book shatters the "Potato Famine" Big Lie that had ruled for the previous 110 years. Note where the author inserts two math fudges to produce her falsely-low death toll. (After reporting the 1841 official partial recount and how it proved that the 1841 census had undercounted by one-third, the author, nevertheless, used the figure that she knew to be false to lower the death toll [to get published, I am told]). Her fudges yield a death toll of "some 2.5 millions." Once her fudges are removed, her methodology and official figures produce a death toll of 5.16 millions. She also omitted the readily-available identities of each of the 75 Food Removal regiments and the warships convoying the lines of grain ships departing for England. She subtly blows the Irish history establishment's cover-up by complimenting their generosity in blaming the genocide on the potato crop failures and the victims' "fecklessness." This book remains, by far, the most truthful Irish "famine" book ever published. A courageous author! An effective opponent of genocide! A Must Read!
Rating:
Summary: What potato famine...
Review: The failure of the potato crops covered all of the British Isles and much of Western Europe;but it was only in Ireland,and principally in the rural west,that "The Great Hunger" occured.This book gives the facts so that one must conclude that it was nothing short of Genocide orchestrated by the British Crown. To believe otherwise, one would have to believe that the Crown was not in control..an enormous stretch of the imagination. This book is very well written and tells the truth of what happened.
Rating:
Summary: What potato famine...
Review: The failure of the potato crops covered all of the British Isles and much of Western Europe;but it was only in Ireland,and principally in the rural west,that "The Great Hunger" occured.This book gives the facts so that one must conclude that it was nothing short of Genocide orchestrated by the British Crown. To believe otherwise, one would have to believe that the Crown was not in control..an enormous stretch of the imagination. This book is very well written and tells the truth of what happened.
Rating:
Summary: This Book Sets the Standard
Review: This is by far the most complete and best written account of the Great Hunger in Ireland. Woodham-Smith sets forth in heart-wrenching detail the causes, experiences and effects of the great potato blight in the mid 1800s in Ireland. Unflinching in its indictment of the laissez-faire response of British authorities such as Trevelyan and Russell, this thorough history sheds a blinding light on a dark period in this history of this great and troubled nation. If you read only one account of the Hunger, make this the one.
Rating:
Summary: This Book Sets the Standard
Review: This is by far the most complete and best written account of the Great Hunger in Ireland. Woodham-Smith sets forth in heart-wrenching detail the causes, experiences and effects of the great potato blight in the mid 1800s in Ireland. Unflinching in its indictment of the laissez-faire response of British authorities such as Trevelyan and Russell, this thorough history sheds a blinding light on a dark period in this history of this great and troubled nation. If you read only one account of the Hunger, make this the one.
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