*Starred Review* Just when it seems that print reference books are inching toward a reliquary fate, new ones are published that belie this notion. This physically substantial volume—replete with impressive color photographs, illustrations, and maps—is such a source. Palpably solid and sturdy in hand, the content is equally weighty and significant, covering details of demographics, geography, history, politics, economics, and folklore surrounding the most pivotal event of Irish history. Sweeping in scope and painstaking in detail, the atlas offers multiple perspectives and insights by way of first-person oral and written accounts, poetry, art, photography, and scholarship. Organized into sections such as “Population Decline and Social Transformations,” “Witnessing the Famine,” “The Scattering,” “Legacy,” and “Remembering the Famine,” the volume is also complemented by numerous charts, tables, and graphs delineating various statistical aspects of the Great Famine. Examples include tables showing the size of the potato crop, mortality rates by gender, number and destination of famine emigrants, and knowledge of the Irish language by province. Smaller chapters within the sections cover interesting topics like “Irish Famine Refugees and the Emergence of the Glasgow Celtic Football Club.” Additionally, the book provides primary resources, which are both stark and heartbreaking. For example, a photograph of a handwritten note directs the deceased of a workhouse to be buried without coffins because of financial constraints. Another such note indicates that the destitute Irish immigrants arriving in Liverpool in 1847 are to be sent back to their homes—a fate that befell 15,000 in that year alone. Though accessibly written, the volume also retains its scholarly tone, with more than 25 pages of endnotes. Overall, this resource is an example of how well done print reference can still be, and is well worth the price for all types of libraries. --Michael Tosko
Review
"Cork University Press has established an enviably high reputation in producing atlases. The latest of the Great Irish Famine maintains and enhances this record. Not only are the maps themselves innovative and attractive to look at, but they communicate clearly an abundance of information, often unfamiliar. The cartography is accompanied by a wealth of other images, sometimes strikingly beautiful, and also hauntingly distressful. In addition, a starry cast of experts provides incisive and illuminating commentary on all aspects of the disaster. All in all, this is likely to prove one of the most original and enduring studies of the grievous famine." -- Toby Barnard,Oxford University
"This Atlas offers a powerful, unflinching and coherent understanding of the Irish Famine as the defining event in Irish history. It balances sweeping survey with minute details, while always attending to the surprising diversity of this small island in the mid nineteenth century. Its unparalleled assemblage of new maps, old images and extensive documentation offers a brilliant teaching aid for the history of Ireland and of the Irish diaspora. Firmly rooted in recent research, saturated in meticulous scholarship, and interdisciplinary in the best sense, it is unafraid to draw the necessary trenchant conclusions. Its broad synthesis offers the best overview we have ever had of this traumatic and defining episode." -- Kevin Whelan,Keough Naughton Notre Dame Centre, Dublin
"This monumental work is far more than an Atlas, it is the definitive summary of all aspects of the Great Irish Famine. The many maps are accompanied by accessible yet scientifically sound texts. The demographics and geography are surveyed with unequaled detail and care, yet the historical background, the politics, and the economics of the Famine are discussed at an equally high scholarly level. Lavishly illustrated and scholarly immaculate, written by the best scholars in the field, this volume belongs in the library of everyone interested in the greatest natural disaster of the modern age." -- Joel Mokyr,Northwestern University
"This work offers accounts found in written and oral sources, and poetry, art, and photography, all enhanced by 200 new digitized maps to create a picture of this pivotal event." ― Library Journal Reviews
"The Atlas is an important attempt to give an extremely wide-ranging and balanced overview of the Great Hunger." ― Durrants
"Its fascinating information puts the famine into historical context, illustrated with full-color maps, line drawings, photos, documents and tables on nearly every page." ― Family Tree Magazine
"The Atlas achieves the remarkable feat of communicating both the most technical aspects of the famine as well as the most emotional...[as] the most thorough portrait of the famine to date, [it] puts us on the right side--the aware and communicative side, that is--of history." ― Irish America Review of Books
"a powerful, unflinching account of the Famine as the defining event in Irish historyfirmly rooted in recent scholarshipit has been a long time since an Irish- studies book appeared that everyone should read" ― Irish Times
"TheAtlas if the Great Irish Famineis a brave, inventive new work of scholarship full of facts and ideas for anyone seeking to understand a pivotal moment in the life if the Irish at home and abroad." ― Journal of American Ethnic History
"Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy (geography, geography emeritus, and cartographer, geography, respectively, University Coll., Cork, Ireland) have made a valuable contribution to studies of the Irish famine of the 1840s with this physically immense book that combines a classic atlas's functions with broader concerns" ― Library Journal
"This monumental work is strongly recommended for any library collection that includes Irish history, US immigration, or studies of the developing world." ― Choice
"Sweeping in scope and painstaking in detail, the atlas offers multiple perspectives and insights by way of first-person oral and written accounts, poetry, art, photography, and scholarship." ― STARRED Booklist
"The Atlas is anindispensablereference work and is precisely the sort of composite effort that will improve our understanding of the Famine." ― Times Literary Supplement
"Atlas of the Great Irish Faminesucceeds in integrating scholarly elucidation of the tragedy and exploration of the human cost with accounts that still have the power to shock after 160 years." ― Victorian Studies
About the Author
John Crowley is Lecturer in the Department of Geography, University College Cork. He is co-editor of Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, the Atlas of Cork City and co-author of The Iveragh Peninsula: A Cultural Atlas of the Ring of Kerry with John Sheehan.
William J. Smyth is Emeritus Professor (and former Department Chair) of Geography at University College Cork. He is author of Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, co-editor of Common Ground: Essays on the Historical Geography of Ireland, and editor of the journal Irish Geography.
Mike Murphy has been cartographer at the Department of Geography, University College Cork for over twenty-five years. He has worked on the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, Atlas of Cork City (2005) and The Iveragh Peninsula: A Cultural Atlas of the Ring of Kerry (2009).
