Why read The Graves Are Walking?

Book cover of The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People

Book description

It started in 1845 and lasted six years. Before it was over, more than one million men, women, and children starved to death and another million fled the country. Measured in terms of mortality, the Great Irish Potato Famine was one of the worst disasters in the nineteenth century -…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Graves Are Walking as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Tyler Mcmahon

Author

There’s a minor thread in my novel about the Irish Potato Famine, and this book was a major resource. It was sobering to learn that there was enough food to feed the Irish peasantry, but it was not distributed according to need. (Much of it was exported.) Worse still, it was a cultural moment in which the wealthy found ways to absolve themselves of the poverty of their neighbors. But I was most shocked to learn about the scientific implications. Essentially, the potato variety that failed was a monoculture. And the solution to the blight involved returning to the Andes,…

From Tyler's list on The best books about the science of food.