Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Subjects Lacking Words?: The Gray Zone of the Great Famine

Subjects Lacking Words?: The Gray Zone of the Great Famine

Breandán, Mac Suibhne

Paperback

Series: Famine Folio

General World HistoryIrish History

Publisher Price: $15.00

ISBN10: 0997837470
ISBN13: 9780997837476
Publisher: Cork Univ Pr
Published: Sep 1 2017
Pages: 44
Weight: 0.56
Height: 0.16 Width: 4.67 Depth: 10.73
Language: English
In the time of Ireland's Great Famine, poor people were, in places, so reduced that they treated each other with brutal callousness. Husbands abandoned wives and children. Mothers snatched food from the hands of infants. Neighbours stole each other's rations. People even killed for food. And this callousness extended to the dead. Human bodies were dumped in mass graves or left unburied to be ravaged by dogs and pigs, rats, ravens, and gulls. There were reports too of cannibalism. In later years, some people, who themselves suffered in the 1840s, were ashamed of having failed to offer human solidarity to others in distress. Yet if there were subjects lacking words--things difficult to describe or explain--those who had been to the abyss did talk of it. Survivors of other humanitarian crises have shown human beings to be remarkably resilient. And, in the case of Ireland, there is no basis for the facile and insular notion that the Great Famine was so deeply tragic as to be too traumatic to recall.

Also in

Irish History

View All