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Black Potatoes
The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–-1850
By Bartoletti, Susan Campbell
- ISBN
- 978-0-61800-271-9
- Publisher
- Houghton
REVIEWS
School Library Journal
Reviewed on November 1, 2001
Gr 6-10 When most American teens talk about hunger, it's that growling sensation before meals. Famine is beyond their ken, an abstraction made only marginally concrete by TV images of the Third World. In the Irish potato famine of 1845-50, it was Europeans starving to death, and the impact on Ireland (one million dead, two million fled) and on the U.S. was staggering (those immigrants came here). The chronology of the disaster unfolds in this gruelingly poignant te...Log In or Sign Up to Read More
Horn Book Magazine
Reviewed on January 1, 2002
How could it be that the failure of a single crop could cause such enormous numbers of people to starve, sicken, and die? In explaining how repeated years of blighted crops decimated Ireland's huge subsistence class, Susan Campbell Bartoletti spells out an important lesson. "One of the harsh realities about famine is that it is not about a lack of food; famine is about who has access to food." While the farm laborers lost their single...Log In or Sign Up to Read More
