
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The suffering in Ireland due to the potato famine was something I knew about but this book told me so much more. The way in which the English administration made things so much worse through incompetence and self-interest was a disgrace, and the book was both informative and disturbing on that subject. The amount of hypocrisy shown by the many land owners and land lords shows how fragile was the ‘control’ given to them, through the commissioners, by the government at that time. The considerable amount of research involved in writing this important book was very evident, and has to be admired. The book covered a lot of other aspects, such as the relationship between malnutrition and cognitive development, particularly the effects on children of course. Again something I found refreshingly different, but no less upsetting for anyone reading this with even the tiniest amount of empathy.
The viewpoint of Frank Parker, the joint author, towards the end of the book was a salutary experience for this reader. He compares and contrasts the catastrophe of the Irish Potato Famine of 1842 with modern famines, and reminds us of just how much work there is still to be done by the more developed nations of the world to relieve those suffering elsewhere. Even so, Parker seems determined to maintain a ‘no blame’ approach in his discourse about the many misfortunes to blight humanity over the centuries, before and since the Irish tragedy - a difficult thing to do. His account does include the inadequacies of both the government and the Church at that time. For anyone wanting to discover much more about ‘hidden’ European social history ‘A Purgatory of Misery’ will be a valuable and helpful experience.
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