The Famine Plot, Tim Pat Coogan
The Famine Plot, Tim Pat Coogan
List: $17.99 | Sale: $12.59
Club: $8.99

The Famine Plot
England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy

Author: Tim Pat Coogan

Narrator: Roger Clark

Unabridged: 11 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/29/2017


Synopsis

During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated in what came to be known as Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger. Waves of hungry peasants fled across the Atlantic to the United States, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you could walk dry shod to America on their bodies."

In this sweeping history, Ireland's best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, tackles the dark history of the Irish Famine and argues that it constituted one of the first acts of genocide. In what the Boston Globe calls "his greatest achievement," Coogan shows how the British government hid behind the smoke screen of laissez faire economics, the invocation of Divine Providence, and a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign, allowing more than a million people to die agonizing deaths and driving a further million into emigration.

Unflinching in depicting the evidence, Coogan presents a vivid and horrifying picture of a catastrophe that shook the nineteenth century and finally calls to account those responsible.

About Tim Pat Coogan

Tim Pat Coogan is Ireland's best known historian and the author of numerous important works on Irish history, including Michael Collins and The IRA, published to wide acclaim. The former editor of the Irish Press, he lives in Dublin, Ireland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill

Tim Pat Coogan thinks Irish historians should show some spine and stop soft-pedaling British culpability for the famine. It is true that the British (through prime minister Blair) finally apologized for the famine fifteen years ago, and have striven to deal justly with the Northern counties since. I......more

Goodreads review by John

I'll be brief. The traditional view of the famine is easily found and read. Coogan takes a position that due to a combination of a free market political view, a concern over money and a world view rooted in a Protestant bias against Catholics that the result in dealing with the potato crop rotting w......more

Goodreads review by Colleen

Coogan has given Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger) the best treatment I have read. There is a myriad of books on the "famine," but I rate this book as 5 stars because in the typical fashion of Coogan, he is unafraid to state the obvious. That is, that what occurred during those years in Ireland was genoc......more

Goodreads review by Dee

Audible sale (#23 of 40) 11 hours 13 min. Narrated by Roger Clark (A) I have known vaguely of the famine that Ireland experienced and the great migration of many Irish to America, and no more. This book is an essential tool in understanding The Great Famine that hit Ireland in 1846 because of a virul......more