Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York

From the award-winning author of Five Points and City of Dreams, “a superb revisionist history” of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine, using their “riveting and deeply personal stories” in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America (Wall Street Journal).

In 1845, a fungus began to destroy Ireland’s potato crop, triggering a famine that would kill one million Irish men, women, and children—a...