The Graves Are Walking

Starred review from April 2, 2012
Author of nine books on medicine, science, and human behavior, Kelly (The Great Mortality) traces a path of misery and devastation as he documents one of the 19th century’s worst disasters, a nightmarish six years that left twice as many dead as the American Civil War. Beginning in 1845, potato blight led to crop failures, starvation, disease, and despair, mass evictions, widespread unemployment, women with dead infants begging on street corners, and feral dogs digging up the graves of the famine dead. Peasants scaled cliffs in winter in search of seagull eggs, while thousands festered with fever and died in hospitals and overcrowded workhouses. The destitute contrived to be arrested since there was better food available in Irish jails. By the time it ended, more than one million were dead and over two million had fled abroad, leaving Ireland’s population reduced by a third. Kelly mined newspapers, diaries, correspondence, journals, and memoirs for in-depth details, all amplified with 25 b&w images (portraits, drawings, political cartoons) for a remarkable recreation of the period. His exhaustive research covers every aspect, threading the gruesome events into a huge panoramic tapestry that reveals political greed lurking behind the pestilence. Agent: Ellen Levine, Ellen Levine Literary Agency.

June 15, 2012
A fresh, fair look at the causes of the devastating Irish potato famine. While there already exists solid coverage of this tragic episode in history--from Thomas Keneally and Colm Toibin, among others--Kelly (The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, 2005, etc.) provides a comprehensive exploration of the crisis in terms of the Irish demographic and geographical makeup, economic infrastructure, tenant-farming patterns, landowner manipulation and wrongheaded British relief policy. The appearance of the mysterious potato blight in 1845, accompanied by the smell of rot, devastated the year's harvest. The old Protestant Irish landholding system was gradually breaking up into smaller groups of tenant farmers, and then into numerous landless laborers (70 percent of the population of rural Ireland in 1841), such as the cottier and the spalpeen, many of whom still celebrated a "Hidden Ireland" of Catholic faith, Celtic culture and a Bedouin-like meanness that appalled British visitors. The collapse of the Irish manufacturing sector in the 1820s had thrust people onto the already overworked land; families were large, and the potato was the most cost-efficient, high-nutrition crop. As news from Ireland worsened, the British government was thrown into disarray, precipitating debate on the hated Corn Laws. Yet relief did not reach the people who needed it; Irish grain was still being exported to British dining tables, and predatory landowners moved to evict impoverished tenant families. Kelly gives a thorough tracking of Irish emigration as well, which helped account for the shrinkage of the Irish population, by more than 2 million people, during the crisis. Roundly researched work with many poignant stories of misery and loss.

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March 15, 2012

Author of the praised and popular The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, Kelly moves on to a major catastrophe of the 19th century, the Great Irish Potato Famine, which cost twice as many lives as the American Civil War. Good, accessible history.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2012
A survivor of the great Irish potato famine could never again mention England without cursing the country. Kelly's account of the famine examines how much England deserved those curses. Kelly, who also wrote a history of the Black Death called The Great Mortality (2005), unfolds a comprehensive history of the events from 1845 to 1847 that led to the decimation of one-third of the Irish population. Kelly uses contemporary accounts to reveal the ravages of the famine in excruciating detail. These individual stories of suffering also lend weight to the thrust of the book, a critique of how the government handled the disaster. Kelly contends that those in charge were more concerned with reform than relief, which only made things worse. Although the text perhaps provides too much detail about such matters as grain importing, Kelly deftly conveys the enormity of what was at stake. The Graves Are Walking seeks accountability for those responsible for the human toll from a shortage of everythingeven coffins.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)