Journalist Duffy (The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1,200 Jews, and Built a Village in the Forest, 2003) recounts the story of the “Strokestown Massacre,” offering a vivid account of the Great Irish Famine along the way.
Murdered by starving tenants as he drove a horse-drawn carriage through his blighted property, Major Denis Mahon soon became both an international symbol of landlord cruelty and an example of the fate that could befall those who grossly mishandled estates in a crisis. Duffy ably demonstrates how a series of debacles, both inside and outside Mahon’s home county of Roscommon, led to the murder. The repeated failures of the all-important potato crop added a greater strain to the relationship between poor Catholics and the wealthy, land-owning Anglo-Irish who governed them. Further, a breakdown in governmental aid and a lack of decisive action in Parliament contributed to this climate of hatred. Duffy asserts that Mahon initially put forth a well-meaning effort to help his troubled tenants, paying for many of them to emigrate to America aboard what would soon be known as “coffin ships.” The acrimony between the tenants and their wealthy Protestant landlords was hardly mollified by the local Catholic clergy, who sided squarely with the ill-fed masses who formed the most desperate elements of their faithful. For her part, Queen Victoria took the murder as further proof that the starving Irish were unworthy of her aid, and her deplorable diary entries reflect the most baffling kind of governmental malfeasance—“really they are terrible people…it is a constant source of anxiety & annoyance.” Many readers will be distressed by the accounts of such large-scale neglect of so many citizens as they were turned out of their shacks for nonpayment of rent. While Duffy occasionally goes into excessive detail about the particulars of the trial, his exploration into this devastating period in Irish history is a scrupulously researched and well-presented record.
Capably transforms one of the bleakest episodes in modern history into an instructive account of events that have lasting repercussions to this day.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-084050-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | WORLD | HISTORY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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