"This impassioned work shows a particularly impressive mastery of published sources, of the well known primary sources, and extraordinarily creative work in the archives. The book is important for Irish studies, and for anthropologists and others who study great social upheaval from eye-witness accounts." --George Marcus, Rice University"This book is original, well researched, and beautifully written. It is a first rate piece of work and a great contribution to the scholarship of Ireland as well as the scholarship in a variety of fields, including anthropology, history, folklore, and literary studies. . . . McLean reads through the accounts of the famine with an eye to the absent presence of the texts, the unexpressed horrors, the conventions of primitivism, the ambivalence of modernity, the anxieties of political economy." --Begoña Aretxaga, University of Texas at Austin