This eloquent, searing, and haunting account of the great famine will shock and move the reader, evoke compassion and furry, and add substance to Ireland's bitter, undying hatred for England. Ireland was, and is, too close to England. Queen Elizabeth, in the 16th century, sent military expeditions to subdue the dissident Catholic, fiercely independent clans across the Irish Sea. In the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell, with pitiless fervor, raised an army to conquer Ireland and, in the name of God and the Commonwealth, appropriate the land, subjugate the resisters, and tax them. The restoration of the British monarch did nothing to relieve the Irish. By the mid-19th century, Ireland was a country of 8 million, mainly peasants, living as tenants on small plots, working for absentee landlords, and never far from the edge of economic and physical disaster. The peasants worked the large cattle farms and grain fields to produce an annual abundance- solely for export- while they themselves were forced to subsist on a single, sometimes abundant, and moderately nutritious crop: potatoes. Then nature, with one cruel slash, set the scene for tragedy. In the summer of 1846, an unknown, uncontrollable disease swiftly turned Ireland's pivotal potato crop into foul slime. The contamination spread with almost incredible speed across the land. The peasant and his family now found their precarious, meager existence- their very lives- in hazard. They turned to their British governors for relief. What they received was starvation, eviction, deeper poverty, and rampant sickness. Their plight is portrayed in staggering, terrible detail. A quarter of the population died miserably in less than two years. Those who could manage steerage fare to escape to America endured almost as grim an ordeal on British ships. One quarter of the emigrants died at sea. The final death toll reached 2 million. The history of three nations was changed and a hatred was born, a hatred that cuts across the years and tears the daily fabric of life in England and Ireland now and into the foreseeable future. Meticulously researched in the United States, England, and Ireland, this book emerges as a moving testament to the victims and an indictment against England at a most shameful hour. -- Publishers description.