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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.
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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.
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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.
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Summary: The Irish Are survivors
Review: Keneally's book will be a classic.He has captured the Irish Diaspora as none could do better.This is a huge story covering time,places, politics,love,hate,family,oppression,wars,peace;but through it all the determination of a race to survive.
Keneally writes so well that he makes it seem that he was right there all the time and that you are travelling right along with him.
Even the Irish ,however you want to define what is Irish,will find that the spread and influence of the Irish is far greater than ever realized.
After so many other's attempts it took an Australian of Keneally's stature to write the story so well.
So many resort to fiction to tell a story,but Keneally tells the story magnificently and does it with facts.
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Summary: Fathers of the Irish Tricolor
Review: The movement around whom Kennealy's epic narrative revolves, the "Young Ireland Movement," was led by William Smith O'Brian, Thomas O'Meagher, John Michell, Terence McManus and Patrick O'Donohue. In the heat of the revolutionary year of 1848, their country beset by famine and official neglect, they attempted a peaceful coup against British rule. They failed, of course, as did others - on both sides of the Anglo-Celtic divide - who sought Irish home rule. But one of their lasting achievements was the adoption of the tricolor Irish flag - originally given them during a visit to Paris as a present by their French sympathizers. These were not the first revolutionaries - Irish rebellions date back way before Oliver Cromwell. But they were the best educated and the most articulate of their day, and as "The Great Shame" reveals, the loss of their leadership was profound. Transported as state prisoners to Van Diemens' Land (modern Tasmania), many of them - most notably Michell and Meagher - escaped to the United States. Meagher was the star, rising to a Union General during the Civil War, distinguishing himself at Fredericksburg and later becoming Goveernor of Montana. Michell, as if to prove that seemingly reasonable people can choose a radically different course, plunged into Confederate politics and became a die-hard secssionist. Hugh Larkin's story serves as something of a prologue to the "Great Shame." A "Ribbonman," he was one of the many blue-collar Irishmen whose campaigns against the British, however passionate, remained localized to their particular home towns. When he journey to Australia, unlike the Young Irelanders, was permanent: he became a successful farmer and, after earning his freedom, a relatively prosperous New South Wales country merchant. Kenneally's own family is descended from him. Even Larkin's story, however, has its tragedies, with a wife and a little daughter left behind - there is simply no historic trace of the little girl's fate. The closing chapters of The Great Shame deal with the Fenian Movement, its transportation to Western Australia and its own leaders' daring escape to America. Keneally also explores the collapse of Gladstone's Home Rule bill - and with it the last best hope for a peaceful settlement of Irish independence. This is not only a terrific history of the time, it is a celebration of the links which bind four great English-speaking countries: Australia, Ireland, Britain and America.
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Summary: Erin go bragh
Review: The story of what happened to the Irish political prisoners known as the Young Irelanders and the Fenians, in the 1850s and 60s, is expertly told by Australian writer Thomas Keneally in "The Great Shame." Sticking firmly to documented history, about the only thing Keneally leaves out is the nastier side of Fenianism, with its secret vendettas and occasional underlying brutality. But that all lies in the misty past, and Keneally has done a first-rate job of bringing much of this truculent history out into the light. This is an epic journey, just as the formation of the Irish diaspora needs it to be. You never quite know where you are you going to go next, as ships sail back and forth from Ireland to Australia and from Australia to the Americas. It is the roaring days of sail just before steam, and gold is being discovered right and left on both sides of the Pacific, sufficient to lend impetus to various Fenian schemes through goldfields' fundraising. One of the characters involved in the 50s was a man destined to become an American Civil War hero with the rank of general. He fought on the Union side while another Irishman who had fought the same battle as he had at home in Ireland, and had also been transported for it, fought with the Confederates. Such were the fortunes of war at that time. The book also recounts how the Fenian forces tried on three occasions, prior to Confederation, to invade Canada in order to hurt the British in North America. They also had the long-term plan of mounting an invasion of Ireland from a Canadian base. It was all a bit pathetic in the end, but for a time, it was in deadly earnest and who could have said what the result might not have been had the Fenian forces succeeded. Perhaps the most interesting part of a very entertaining book is the retelling of an attempted rescue from Western Australia of the last group of Fenian "lifers," all soldiers who had been cashiered from the British Army for their part in Fenian plots in England and Ireland. These men had little hope of ever leaving their prison, and were mostly ailing by the time American Fenians had raised the enormous sum needed to buy a ship to go to their rescue. The hair-raising tale of what happened is one of the nineteenth century's best adventure stories, and Keneally relishes the telling of it. So this is a book which has everything an Irishman, or an Irishman at heart, could wish for. I wonder what the reaction of the English might be to such a tale. The evidence is somewhat damning, to the effect that political repression of the most odious kind was used during and after the famine. Of course, this is only referring to the nineteenth century and does not go back in any detail to the awful story of Cromwell's men or even earlier, which might lead one to think that the English, when they came to Ireland, only did so to practice. If you've got any Irish blood in you, (and if you didn't previously know one way or the other, this may prove to be a glorious occasion for finding out) you'll fairly quickly be learning to say the old war cry, Erin go bragh. Ireland forever! It's a strange tale and one that should make us reflect about the nature of power and its misuse. It all seems so long ago now but that's just a mirage of sorts, for it was really only just the other day. Lastly I should point out that writing a book like this must have been a sheer delight. Keneally seems to have visited many of the sites he talks about and they are often in out of the way places. I imagine that it was an absolute pleasure for him to write a book like this and I look forward to the day when he finds time to do it again. I can't recommend "The Great Shame" highly enough.
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Summary: Heroic effort to bring so much History to one momentous work
Review: This book first caught my attention, as this is the Author who penned what has become a classic both in book and movie form, "Schindler's List". The book also was to explain much about the Australian aspect of the Irish Diaspora that was a facet I had not read about. My Great-Grandfather came to the US and his Brother went to Australia, so there was personal interest as well. The book is sweeping in many respects, its length, the time in History it covers, and the meticulous research that must have been required in its creation. The beauty of the work is it can be read as a major Historical Work or if the reader prefers, a 19th Century novel. I found the writing to be very dense requiring more time than I normally would take to read such a book. There is so much information that if much of it is new and you wish to really get your mind around it, it requires a good deal of time. I actually read the book in parts and took time to put in to perspective what I had read. This book is probably about double the length or even more than that of the average book today, but don't deny yourself a great read because it takes two hands to carry. Irish History is not the material that makes for many happy endings. Another reviewer mused about what they would think of this book in England, I think it would be hard to find on a bookshelf! The History of and the time that brackets The Great Famine is as grim as any human suffering you have read before. The English landlords behavior was atrocious and this book pulls no punches in that regard. The Author also talks about some of the more unsavory groups that operated in Ireland and often found themselves on a ship to the other side of the world. To the Author's credit he does not dwell, he recounts History and it's left to the reader to draw conclusions. Someone else wrote there were some factual errors and they appear well informed. I don't believe they are detrimental to the work or its merit, they are worth knowing for historical accuracy. Whether you are Irish or not the book is time well spent. At the conclusion you will be sorry it's over, but I always take that as a sign it was a great read. And as someone once said "there are no Irish stories with happy endings". This book may not be uplifting in the traditional sense, but as present developments in the news are showing that saying may yet be proven wrong. Ireland is doing very well as it enters the 21st Century, and some of the descendents of those who were forced to leave, are now returning. As the Diaspora Descendents returns, and Ireland flourishes, that would be the happiest ending of all.
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Summary: This book should have been titled "Republicans at Large"
Review: This book is absolutley nothing like I thought it'd be. By the title and description on the back, I figured this book would be a narrative of the forced or voluntary exile of most of the population and their subsequent settling in the new world(s). I expected a braod stroke but was instead given a pencil. I'm not complaining, it's just that my expectations were not met, hence disappointment. Overall, I thought this book was OK, nothing particulary spectacular. I thought the book would have been a bit more efficeint had it focused merely on the Young Irelanders or the Fenians. I understand their fates were intertwined but most of their interaction could have been downplayed/omitted. I also felt that the book ended sloppily. It's almost as if the author felt it was getting late and decided to wrap things up. The advantage of reading history books is that even if the book isn't great, you still learn something. That pretty much summarizes my feelings on the matter.
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Summary: A Fascinating Read
Review: Thomas Keneally looks into his own family history, and ends up setting forth the fascinating story of Young Ireland, one of the most neglected periods of Irish history. With his great eye for detail and beautiful imagery, Keneally relates the story of such Irish legends as William Smith O'Brien, Thomas Meagher and John Mitchel. "The Great Shame" brings the lives of these and the other Irish legends of the time to vivid life, following them from their roots in Ireland, to their exile in Van Diemen's Land, and culminating in their glorious rebirth in Civil War America. Read this book!
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Summary: Vivid of Irish Political Exiles
Review: Thomas Keneally's The Great Shame (and the Triumph of the Irish in the English Speaking World) is more specific in topic than the title implies. It is the essentially the story of two groups of transported (to Australia) political prisoners in the nineteenth centures, the Young Irelanders in 1848 and the Fenians in 1865. This long book is vividly written to bring to life the careers of these men whose exploits touched the nations of Ireland, England and America, as well as the budding nation states of Canada and Australia. The only flaw of the book is that it could have done with some shortening of sections, such as the Civil War exploits of Thomas Francis Meagher and the escape of the Fenain soldiers from Australia. At any rate, the author takes the reader on an expansive adventurous journey through a people's struggle and their tragic century of protest. It is fascinating to watch each of the men (and one notable woman, Eva of the Nation) adapt to whichever country they adopt and fight and, sometimes, die for their new nation, Irish rebellion transformed into a universal form of idealism and heroism. A truly monumental work.
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