With his latest publication, Figures in a Famine Landscape, veteran scholar of the Great Irish Famine Ciarán Ó Murchadha offers a concise yet detailed contribution to the historiography of the event, and will likely command a broad audience including advanced academic researchers, their graduate and undergraduate students, and general readers. Joining an active field that has in many ways moved (justifiably) toward assessing the legacy and memory of the famine as much as its trajectory and causes, Ó Murchadha instead offers a direct look at the experiential and local administrative details of the event—especially its early phase between 1845 and 1847—through an underutilized approach, that of micro-biography. It should also be emphasized, lest it be lost in the main title selected for the book, that this work is a rich local history of County Clare, albeit one with findings that have an impact on our general understanding of the Great Irish Famine.

Scholarship on the famine remains a dynamic field more than twenty years since the sesquicentennial first inspired a new infusion of research. But aside from occasional profile pieces—Maureen Murphy's recent biography of the American witness to the Famine, Asenath Nicholson (Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine, 2015) provides one of a few recent examples—approaches privileging the individual lived experience of the famine have been fleeting. Landmarks in the field such as Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger (1962) discussed the lives of individuals, but the focus was usually on upper (particularly British) administrative figures, most of all the assistant secretary at the Treasury, Sir Charles Trevelyn. On the other end of the methodological scale, essential contributions to the historiography by Cormac Ó Gráda, Joel Mokyr, and James Donnelly, Jr., part of a tradition that extends in only slightly modified form into the recent mixed-methods approach of the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (2012), have tended to push individuals to the sideline of a history that encompasses charitable organizations, measures of economic and demographic distress, administrative analysis, and now geospatial investigation. The drive to consider the famine's place in commemoration and collective memory has necessarily privileged post-famine responses as much as the event itself. As such, Ó Murchadha's selection of nine individuals to convey—through their intersecting experience of the famine—findings about how and why events unfolded as they did in County Clare provides a refreshing return to the main subject.

Ó Murchadha is transparent about the criteria behind the individuals he has selected, and their obvious strengths and weaknesses as representatives of the local famine experience. The most glaring limitation is that all nine are male. All have left significant archival material, whether diaries, appearances in the official administrative record, or newspaper coverage, thus enabling rich historical detail but at the cost of foregrounding a stratum of middling landlords and middle-class journalists, agents, doctors, and religious officials over lower-class voices. But Ó Murchadha is not claiming to present one representative voice of the famine experience; rather, he is offering one of many. Moreover, his choice of individuals, because of their well-documented place in the historical record and numerous intersecting stories, enables him to recover in a more detailed manner the varied responses to the famine of a cohort of local authorities of all political and religious stripes. Thus, the book features Clare Journal newspaper proprietor John Busteed Knox, who had published a letter to the editor by another featured individual, Father Michael Meehan, complaining about the eviction policies of a third profile subject, the landlord Crofton Moore Vandeleur. This is just one of several masterfully interwoven intersections in the lives contained in the book (the others are public-works inspector Edmond Wynne, landlord John Singleton, medical doctor Patrick Maxwell Cullinan, Protestant minister Henry Murphy, land agent Marcus Keane, and Kilrush poor-law-union inspector Arthur Kennedy) that reveal the mastery of the primary-source material in evidence here.

The most important finding in this assembled set of biographies, however, lies in the revelations about the administrative ideologies and personal convictions shaped by reactions to mass death. We learn a great deal about the mutability of attitudes toward poverty, famine relief, and government policy, as well as the willful blindness toward suffering that afflicted too many participants who were not at risk of starvation or illness. Knox, known at the start of the famine as a politically moderate Protestant, vacillated between outrage and acquiescence to landed interest before settling on an indifferent fatigue to famine news by 1847. By contrast, Kennedy, an initial stalwart of landlords and skeptic of the laboring poor, arrived by Famine's end at a much more sympathetic view of the sufferers who surrounded him. One conclusion that places the subjects of Ó Murchadha's inquiry at odds with the focus of recent scholarship on memory and ideology is his finding that in the end, the “Famine was a brief interlude. … [A]s resumed afterwards the lives of some of our figures went on as before, others were nudged in a new direction and in one or two cases radically altered, although not necessarily as a direct outcome of interface with Famine horror” (182). This inference is reasonable from the history of the individuals selected, but it heightens the contrast between the nine featured here and the millions for whom the famine irretrievably destroyed their community and cast a shadow over subsequent generations born to survivors.

There are limitations to this biographical approach as well, most significantly the constraint it places on Ó Murchadha in linking the individual experience to the central issues of famine historiography. One such example concerns the question of culpability as manifested in the shifting of the cost of relief efforts off of the central treasury and onto the backs of local distressed poor-law unions in 1847—with the attendance ramifications for historians who must weigh whether the local taxpayers (that is, landlords and the tenants they squeezed to meet these obligations) were themselves victims of imperial mismanagement. We learn that one such local taxpayer, landlord John Singleton, opposed this shift, but Ó Murchadha interprets this fact only in light of Singleton's self-interest rather than pursuing its relevance to his broader historiographical theme (56). These are, however, small missed opportunities given the compact and yet rich content available in this study.