Snag The Great Shame Interpreted By Thomas Keneally Conveyed As Interactive EBook

read. If you have the time to get into the details of the great Irish diaspora, then this is the book, Thomas Keneally has extensively researched the history of the various Irish leaders of thethCentury and how they influenced the way Ireland was to be perceived by the New World North America, Australia.


It was an old pattern: Ireland emasculating its heroes, then passing autograph books to them through the bars,

Keneally starts the book with the history of his own Irish ancestor, a "criminal" who was transported to the Australian penal colony for making threats against his landlord.
The author paints a dire picture of life in Ireland, even before the potato famine occurred, Families could be dispossessed of their humble lodgings overnight and left to beg for alms, Crimes were punished harshly, even the most minimal misdemeanors met with shackled imprisonment aboard the Botany Bay transports, Before, most Irish emigrants settled in Canada, usually in Nova Scotia or Newfoundland or New Brunswick, These were the Ulster Irish, who viewed emigration as an opportunity rather than an exile, After, the United States became the preferred destination, especially after the Potato Famine ofcaused desperate journeys across the stilltreacherous Atlantic ocean.
The final allotment were sent to the Aussie penal colonies, where most would never see their wives or families again, At leastof the Irish populace died or left Ireland, which suited the Anglo overseers, as they felt the land would be easier to govern with fewer native residents.


But Australia was the opposite of handy Nova Scotia, In the Irish imagination, it was synonymous with the worst kind of exile, the unchosen one the exile of chains,

Younger Irish leaders started popping up, mostly from the upperclass AngloIrish families, They, too, were transported, seen as dangerous political fiends who might sway the remaining starving denizens of the Emerald Isle, Some escaped their penal chains and set sail for the United States, where they fought in the Civil War both sides and established new homes and new careers.
In the New Yorks and Bostons of America, they found something they had never found elsewhere, which was leverage and power, The Emigrant Society would greet Irish newcomers and offer them job advice, lodging tips, and the ability to report swindlers and unjust sea captains.
Once established, there was also a set process to send money back home, This was a completely different approach than the beingthrownonshore experience in Canada or the slavery of Australia, It also explains the long binding loyalty that still exists between the East Coast of the Atlantic states and Ireland,

This book really is a fascinating read, Even the section on the blighted potato destruction reads like a thriller, Today we know the potato blight was caused by a fungus now thought to be extinct, yet it wrecked so many lives while helping to build three newer nations Canada, the United States, Australia with the sweat and tears of the distressed Irish.
However, the wilted potato is not the The Great Shame's focus, which instead looks at the very detailed biographies of the various men who clamored for expatriate control.
Keneally gets weedy, to the point that he seems to know where an escapee, for example, was sitting while waiting for a clandestine meeting in the outback bush.
Still, fascinating.

The fabled rebellions never ignited in Ireland, at least not until thethCentury, Every time a new leader expected the populace to rise up to smite the English oppressors, not much happened, Keneally makes a valid point that it was the Irish myth of irrepressibility, rather than the angry armed village, which conquered the world.


Book Season Year Round long voyages
The story of what happened to the Irish political prisoners known as the Young Irelanders and the Fenians, in thes ands, is expertly told by Australian writer Thomas Keneally in "The Great Shame.
" Sticking firmly to documented history, about the only thing Keneally leaves out is the nastier side of Fenianism, with its secret vendettas and occasional underlying brutality.
But that all lies in the misty past, and Keneally has done a firstrate job of bringing much of this truculent history out into the light.


This is an epic journey, just as the formation of the Irish diaspora needs it to be, You never quite know where you are you going to go next, as ships sail back and forth from Ireland to Australia and from Australia to the Americas.
It is the roaring days of sail just before steam, and gold is being discovered right and left on both sides of the Pacific, sufficient to lend impetus to various Fenian schemes through goldfields' fundraising.


One of the characters involved in thes was a man destined to become an American Civil War hero with the rank of general.
He fought on the Union side while another Irishman who had fought the same battle as he had at home in Ireland, and had also been transported for it, fought with the Confederates.
Such were the fortunes of war at that time,

The book also recounts how the Fenian forces tried on three occasions, prior to Confederation, to invade Canada in order to hurt the British in North America.
They also had the longterm plan of mounting an invasion of Ireland from a Canadian base, It was all a bit pathetic in the end, but for a time, it was in deadly earnest and who could have said what the result might not have been had the Fenian forces succeeded.


Perhaps the most interesting part of a very entertaining book is the retelling of an attempted rescue from Western Australia of the last group of Fenian "lifers," all soldiers who had been cashiered from the British Army for their part in Fenian plots in England and Ireland.
These men had little hope of ever leaving their prison, and were mostly ailing by the time American Fenians had raised the enormous sum needed to buy a ship to go to their rescue.
The hairraising tale of what happened is one of the nineteenth century's best adventure stories, and Keneally relishes the telling of it.


So this is a book which has everything an Irishman, or an Irishman at heart, could wish for, I wonder what the reaction of the English might be to such a tale, The evidence is somewhat damning, to the effect that political repression of the most odious kind was used during and after the famine.
Of course, this is only referring to the nineteenth century and does not go back in any detail to the awful story of Cromwell's men or even earlier, which might lead one to think that the English, when they came to Ireland, only did so to practice.


If you've got any Irish blood in you, and if you didn't previously know one way or the other, this may prove to be a glorious occasion for finding out you'll fairly quickly be learning to say the old war cry, Erin go bragh.
Ireland forever! It's a strange tale and one that should make us reflect about the nature of power and its misuse, It all seems so long ago now but that's just a mirage of sorts, for it was really only just the other day.


Lastly I should point out that writing a book like this must have been a sheer delight, Keneally seems to have visited many of the sites he talks about and they are often in out of the way places.
I imagine that it was an absolute pleasure for him to write a book like this and I look forward to the day when he finds time to do it again.
I can't recommend "The Great Shame" highly enough, A big, rambling, true history of several Irish families, including the author's, fighting for personal and Irish freedom on a world stage.
There is no narrative arc, though, and it lacks a certain focus, following one family, then another, until we lose track of things.
In theth century the Irish population was halved, This masterly book traces the three causes of this depletion first the manine, second the Irish diaspora and the emigrations to places such as America and Canada and thridly the transportations of political activists to Australia.
It is a quest for Keneally's Irish ancestors, Based on unique research among littleused sources, the characters and their stories come brilliantly to life this is an important book in which the main political themes are fascinatingly explored.
It also contains a remarkable collection of photographs and documents, I did not think much of the writing in Schindler's List, which I recently read, and here I found that the style was not due to Keneally being cajoled into writing that book but that it really is his own.
He drops the "and" from a series of three when the conjunction would clarify and he uses fragments without intention, Not like this. Where they do not add to his point, But detract.

Plus I just finished Governess about miserable Cpeople so maybe I should take a break from miserable Cpeople before facing more, especially in a voice I don't like.


He writes in thes! that in thes the "droit de seigneur" was still in effect in Ireland, I'm sure peasants suffered rape aplenty but I'm surer that this "right" was neither codified nor regularly practiced, Very interesting history of the Irish and how they changed the world, VERY long. Wellresearched and quite readable. Keneally is a great storyteller and clearly a lover of history, It may seem like a silly nit to pick, but his use of the word "Democrat" as an adjective was quite jarring.
I don't know if that was the norm in theth century, but currently it is a sign of brazen disrespect and kept making me feel he was coming at the history from a farright slant.
I didn't see any other sign of radical Republican bias, so I wonder where that tic came from, There are many threads to this tale, and many characters, all well drawn, The details were overwhelming, but that's the way it is with these kinds of histories, This is very good history for a fiction writer, but I don't trust it implicitly, and it didn't really give me a taste to find out more.
I really wanted to like this book and thought it would be great but, . . in a word boring. I think there should have been more of a story developed instead of the authors intent to make it as historically accurate as possible.
It was obviously painstakingly researched but in the end the research took over and prevented it from being a good read, The Hugh Larkin part was interesting and a book on his life up until he died would have made a good first book.
The American Civil War part was like reading an old school history book The book is overpages long and it is a real commitment to read it.
When I began The Great Shame I really enjoyed it, The depth of study into the lives and exploits of the persons depicted especially the story of Hugh Larkin, Keneally's own ancestor.
This story had the most energy, but when Hugh's tale was done, so was my enthusiasm, I found the escapes and releases of the transported Young Irelanders interesting, but their move into the American politics of the Civil War era lost me and I couldn't do more than skim the last third of the book.
Perhaps if this wasn't the third historical text I've read in the past three months I might've been able to sink my teeth in a bit more.
History mostlyth century of Irish diaspora and struggle for independence and of course the famine, Ireland was one of the earliest colonies of England concurrent with the Spanish colonization of the new world, Stories of oppressed populations are often similar with exploitation, resistance, and rebellion as common themes I mean that is common sense and it leaves marks long after said oppression lifts.
Not saying the Irish are anywhere near the worst cases among oppressed populations I mean outright slavery and genocide were carried out on African and indigenous populations around this time.
But down and out people do have get marks even if the oppression is lighter, I probably have more of a stake in the story because

it affected my ancestors but it is interesting always to get the story from the business end of the exploitation process.
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