SOURCE: Myers, Kevin. “… And Famine and Hatred.” Spectator 286, no. 9020 (23 June 2001): 43-4.

In the following review, Myers offers a positive assessment of The Irish Famine, praising the work's scholarship and wisdom.

[The Irish Famine] is a book I opened in trepidation, not because of what I know of the authors, but because the Famine in Ireland is rather like those provocations which turned mild-mannered Bill Bixby into the Incredible Hulk, destroying cities with his teeth. The sweetest and most reasonable people can become profoundly unsweet and unreasonable when the subject of the Famine is broached, and it is not hard to see why.

The combined French experience of the two world wars, plus those in Algeria and Vietnam, does not even begin to compare with the scale of the calamity delivered to Ireland by the Famine. Some Irish observers, especially those who cherish oppression and woe as a badge...