Books: Ireland's Black Death

THE GREAT HUNGER (510 pp.)—Cecil Woodham-Smith—Harper & Row ($6.95).

Between the Black Death and Buchenwald, Europe saw nothing like it west of Russia. In the five years of Ireland's Potato Famine (1845-49), 1,500,000 of the Irish perished—most of them starved to death. They wandered the road and died in ditches. Beggars could get nothing when all were beggars and there was nothing worth the begging. Typhus appeared. Whole villages became rotten cemeteries. The blind windows of the huts stared from their whitewashed walls like eyes in so many skulls.

There was no revolt worth...