The Graves Are Walking

In his introduction, Kelly (The Great Mortality) suggests he'll be presenting a new interpretation of the 1840s Irish famine, focusing on the attempted Anglicization of Ireland during the period. This would have been a fascinating discussion had it been fully developed. As it stands, however, he presents a standard narrative of the famine, with a focus on the years 1845–47, which will be familiar to anyone who has read histories such as Christine Kinealy's A Death-Dealing Famine or Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger. Kelly does an excellent job illustrating the course of the famine in Ireland with anecdote and personal incident, but he falls into some classic patterns of Irish history writing by depicting the English as villains (at best hapless, at worst malign) and the Irish as heroes. Yet he also offers excellent explanations of the scientific basis of the blight and a larger European context for the spread of the fungal infection.