But just as Foster’s Modern Ireland 1600-1972 is an excellent synthesis of a bigger story, so A Death-Dealing Famine brings together much of the recent writing on the Famine. She will not like the first description, for Foster is the arch-revisionist, not a species that finds favour with Dr Kinealy, since revisionists seek to remove blame from considerations of Ireland’s past and Kinealy is very strong on blame. At one level she assumes the role of the Roy Foster of Famine history and at another the mantle of a modern Cecil Woodham-Smith. Dr Kinealy seems to be striving to achieve two things simultaneously. Her new work, A Death-Dealing Famine, is a curate’s-egg sort of a book. But there are also good local studies and collections of contemporary documents, a few fine reflective essays, and some carefully crafted monographs, including Christine Kinealy’s 1994 volume, This Great Calamity. Atkenson has recently described as "Famine porn" as their authors scour the lexicon of shocking vocabulary to arouse our indignation. Some outpourings are far from scholarly some fall into the category of what D.H. Since then the drought has been broken by a deluge. Not long ago Cormac Ó Gráda lamented the dearth of scholarly writing about the Great Famine.
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