Plentiful country The great potato famine and the making of Irish New York

A historian of U.S. immigration, Anbinder (Five Points, 2010) tackles the history and impact of Irish immigration to New York City in the mid-nineteenth century. Centuries of plunder by English aristocracy turned the Emerald Isle into an impoverished nation even before the potato famine turned life deadly. Anbinder details the human horrors of the potato famine in unadorned prose that only adds to its emotional impact. Escaping Ireland, both middle-class and destitute people boarded crowded ships for the dreadful month-long crossing to new life in New York. There, they generally soon prospered, despite initial prejudices against them. Drawing from savings bank records, Anbinder traces individuals' rise (and fall) as day laborers, peddlers, artisans, clerks, business owners, and professionals. Many who started in Manhattan's tenement-filled Lower East Side moved away to populate Midwestern farms and cities, and the succeeding generation became great contributors to American political, industrial, and cultural landscapes. Anbinder weaves together individual immigrants' stories with more general history to make this a remarkably perceptive and engaging portrait of American immigration history.

In this eye-opening account, Anbinder (City of Dreams), a historian at George Washington University, draws on records housed in the New York Public Library's archives of the former Emigrant Savings Bank in Manhattan to document the lives of NYC's "famine Irish." Utilizing these banking records to track individual bank patrons over their lifetimes, he shows that even though these immigrants--who fled the famine that followed the Irish potato blight of 1845--began their American lives in poverty and struggle, many were able to prosper. Most started out in New York as unskilled laborers or domestics, though some were skilled craftsmen. The next step was usually to become a peddler, selling such cheaply attained items as apples, corks, and charcoal. Successful sellers rose to become clerks, civil servants, or business owners. A few even made it to the professional class of doctors and lawyers. Following these workers as they climbed this social ladder, Anbinder points out that they were hardworking, frugal, and managed to build up savings and avoid wasteful spending, even as most native-born Americans believed they were "lazy," "indolent," and "utterly lacking in ambition"--an attitude which Anbinder argues is wrongly still the dominant historiographic perspective on the famine Irish. This is a master class in turning a large, data-rich archive into a fluid narrative. Readers will be engrossed. (Mar.)

A scholarly history of 19th-century Irish immigration to New York City, and from there to points far inland. Anbinder writes that while Irish immigrants to New York in the years around the Potato Famine were not as poor as they've been portrayed, only "four in ten managed to improve their standing in the socio-economic hierarchy over the course of their lifetimes." While 40% may not be the most sparkling record, the author later qualifies his remarks with the perhaps self-evident observation that those who landed with useful trades did better on the whole than those who became street sweepers and junk sellers. It wasn't all beer and skittles, then, but it wasn't all Five Points and cholera-ridden tenements, either. Anbinder notes that about three-quarters of the 1.3 million Irish to arrive in the U.S. during and immediately after the Potato Famine landed in New York--but most of them pushed on, and some of the most interesting episodes in this rather formless narrative center on immigrants who made their way to California. Anbinder is good at reading the statistics, working with both digital tools and a vast archive of documentary materials. Using those resources, he ferrets out such things as the gradual Irish dominance of the New York police force, fueled by the fact that apart from giving authority to the previously disempowered, "police work paid better than unskilled work and almost every kind of artisanal labor." Another lucrative line of work was owning a saloon, and both the police and the alcohol connections have explanatory powers in the New York of today. For all the statistics and social-historical insights, though, the book could have used more vigorous storytelling along the lines of Sean Connolly's On Every Tide. Sometimes arid, but with insights into the growth and evolution of Irish America. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.