Rating: 
Summary: Noel Ignatiev, a racist?
Review: The most ironic thing about this book is that the author creates his own racial construct - the Irish, so he can prove that they are respsonsible for all the racial ills of today. The book would be comical if the author wasn't so serious.
Rating: 
Summary: Good reference, but Prof. Ignatiev overreaches
Review: This book is useful as a catlogue of many important and interesting events, and students will find it a handy reference tool. However, Prof. Ignatiev would have us believe that the Irish, in their natural state, were pure and untainted by bigotry, but that contact with America somehow caused them to become racist. This is untenable at best. He could have argued his thesis more effectively in a shorter essay. Short on analysis, the book is merely an interesting laundry list of riots and other events, and his many anecdotes do not do much to advance his argument. Nonetheless, the work is an interesting read and should prove useful to students.
Rating: 
Summary: Dr. Saul missed the point...
Review: Unlike the other reviewer who apparently missed the entire point of the book, I found this book powerful and enlightening. The opening pages of the book delineate the plight of the Irish in their homeland and uses this as a basis for their evolution as citizens in the US. What is more, they are not the only ones who go through this evolutionary process of "becoming white", the Poles, Italians, Jews and others after them would have their own journey to assimilation into US culture as well. As this book clearly describes, immigrants had the possibility to become white, African Americans did not. Further, the Irish had to choose: conform to the native-born culture or be forever shut out of opportunity just like the Blacks. It is an illuminating look at our society and one which truly does help us understand today. I read this book as part of a 13-book cirriculum for a graduate history seminar whose topic was the history of Racism in the US after 1870. It was one of the best-written texts and provided an excellent foundation for cultural studies. I highly reccomend it to anyone who seeks a better understanding of social history and today's US culture. Rather than placing blame, the author provides the facts and understanding of what happened, good and bad, so that we see the complexity and ultimately, the uselessness of blame. It is only with this understanding that we can start to make changes.
Rating: 
Summary: Why shoot the messenger?
Review: Wow. When the best argument your reviewers can come up with for disliking your book are "[the author] is a Jew" and "blacks weren't discriminated against [even at the time covered in the book, during which black people could legally be bought and sold in the South, disenfranchised and barred from most jobs in the North; apparently being legally defined as property doesn't qualify as discrimination], the Irish just worked harder," you know you've struck a nerve.As a Canadian of Scots-Irish ancestry, I found this book fascinating. The history of the Irish in Canada is a bit different from the history of the American Irish; overall I'd say it's less painful. This book shed a lot of light on issues that I didn't expect it to touch, like black-white relations, abolitionism, and the contrast between the antebellum North and South (now I understand a little better why Southerners say they have been unfairly demonized; the Philadelphia and Boston described in the book were hardly freemen's paradise). When the author says he wants to get rid of the "white race," he doesn't mean that he wants to get rid of white PEOPLE; he means that he wants to get rid of the category, "white," which is neither traditional nor especially meaningful. (I note that the reviewer below refers to the pale-skinned author of the book as "a Jew" rather than as "white" - demonstrating the author's point about race quite handily. "White" clearly refers to something beyond skin colour.) What the author is trying to point out is that blacks were enslaved before the theory of white supremacy came about; people with white skin (in this case the Irish) were not necessarily treated or regarded as "white" automatically; white isn't just a colour, it's a social position that the Irish had to struggle very hard to get, and which was more or less defined by separation from the people who could NOT get that position no matter how hard they tried, i.e. blacks. I do not see this book as an attempt to smear or blame the Irish. It's not really about the Irish so much as it's a study of American immigration and assimilation to racial ideals, using the Irish as an example. Others could tell and have told similar stories about the Italians, the Jews, etc. In an atmosphere of scarcity, disorder, and brutal competition, people do what they need to do to get by. When there is an upper class and an underclass, people will do their damnedest to get into the upper class, or at least not to fall in with the underclass - this is a matter of survival as well as pride. It's sad to read about disadvantaged people fighting over scraps; it would be nicer to read that blacks and poor immigrants had banded together to fight for freedom, more rights, better pay and working conditions, etc. - but if this is not what happened, it's not Noel Ignatiev's fault, is it? I would have liked to see a few more chapters - the book ends rather abruptly around the time of Reconstruction, and clearly the assimilation of the Irish into "white" society was not finished at that point. I also think a few of the earlier chapters are a bit unfocussed, but I may just need to re-read.
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