Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine

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Tom Hayden, antiwar activist of the 1960s, has lately been spending much time exploring his ancestors' lives in the Ireland of the famine years. Enlisting contributors on both sides of the water, among them Eavan Boland, Jimmy Breslin, Seamus Heaney, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Tim Pat Coogan, Hayden here offers a collection of personal responses to that historic catastrophe--which, more than one essayist notes, not only killed and displaced millions of Irish but also undid much of traditional Irish culture, for, as Ní Dhomhnaill notes, 90 percent of the Famine's victims were monolingual Irish speakers, and with them perished a huge store of knowledge and memory. She also remarks that the Irish have done much to come to terms with the catastrophe in recent years; "it is a sign of our recovery from the collective trauma of the Famine that we can finally objectify it, and put it outside our psyche, the better to study it objectively."

Some of the pieces are less successful, but most have a fine air of both scholarly solidity and political engagement. Hayden brackets the collection with sensitive essays on his explorations of the past, noting that American Indians from a soon-to-be-displaced eastern tribe sent $170 in relief funds to Ireland, recognizing, as he suggests, that they had much in common with their fellow sufferers at the hands of empire. --Gregory McNamee