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The Great Shame
Thomas Keneally
Thomas Keneally's *The Great Shame* is a huge, teeming history of the Irish in the nineteenth century, told largely through the transported and the exiled. Keneally — the Australian novelist behind *Schindler's Ark* — began with his own family's connection to Irish transportation and expanded outward into an epic of famine, rebellion, emigration, and reinvention across Ireland, Britain, North America and Australia. Following real figures from Irish jails to the far side of the world, he shows how catastrophe at home seeded Irish communities that would help build the English-speaking world. First published in 1998, it is narrative history written with a novelist's instinct for character and scene. At well over 700 pages it is a commitment, but a rewarding one for readers who like their history vast, human, and story-driven.
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The author
Thomas Keneally (born 1935) is one of Australia's foremost novelists, winner of the Booker Prize for Schindler's Ark (later filmed as Schindler's List). Of Irish-Australian descent, he has repeatedly turned his novelist's craft to history, and here he writes narrative nonfiction on a grand scale.
The book
The Great Shame, published in 1998 and subtitled The Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World, follows real Irish men and women — many of them transported convicts and political prisoners — from famine-era Ireland to Britain, North America, and Australia. Through their individual fates Keneally builds a sweeping account of how disaster and coercion at home dispersed the Irish across the globe, where they took root and rose.
How it reads
Keneally's fiction-writer's eye for scene and character carries the reader through a very long book; the human stories give the statistics of famine and emigration a face. Some historians find it more narrative than analytical, but that storytelling drive is exactly its appeal.
For more context
It complements Tim Pat Coogan's Wherever Green Is Worn and broader famine histories, and connects closely to the history of penal transportation to Australia.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Thomas Keneally
- Publisher
- Nan A. Talese / Doubleday
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1998
- ISBN
- 0-385-47697-3
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine
Places