Widely applauded upon its initial release in 2007, Peter Quinn’s expansive study of the Irish in America is a treacherous minefield of recorded history and personal opinion, bursting at the seams with generalizations and supposition.

It is a difficult and daunting chore to trust a work of non-fiction that the author admits is “a work in progress” and “tentative, subjective, and personal.” One might imply from his curriculum vitae that Quinn, who has worked as a speech writer for two New York governors and as Corporate Editorial Director for Time Warner, is a masterful spin doctor. In Looking for Jimmy, Quinn applies his spin technique to the social history on the ways in which “the Irish struggled to adopt a new identity in America while holding fast to the old.” In the end, the reader is often left wondering what the truth is and what forms the author’s opinion.

The Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52 looms large in Quinn’s mix of reverie, reflection, and history, a collection of 22 previously unpublished pieces and a handful of “articles and reviews substantially rewritten since they first appeared in print.” (Again challenging his own credibility.)

The epic disaster, Quinn notes in his poem, A Famine Remembrance, was an end to lives, to families, to entire villages, to young and old alike, “their suffering and death made bearable for us in the sanitation of numbers, in one statistic, faceless, nameless, unsexed: at least a million dead.”

The famine created an exodus, Quinn rhapsodizes, “a wound that would not clot.” An estimated two million people, a quarter of the Irish population, would abandon their homeland in the span of ten years. (The actual numbers have always been in dispute by historians but one fact is concrete and indisputable: Ireland’s population was reduced by 20 to 25 percent during the Famine years. An 1851 census reveals a total population of 6,575,000—a precipitous drop of 1,600,000 in ten years.)

For all its complex political, social, and economic consequences—with the inciting incident falling under the header of ‘The Law of Unintended Consequences’—Quinn, in the exhaustive monograph that provides the title for the book, assigns the Famine to what he perceives to be its rightful place in human history:

The Irish Famine of the 1840s and the Jewish Holocaust of the 1940s are very different events and should not be confused or equated. Neither a passing pogrom nor a sudden outburst of ethnic violence nor a wartime atrocity nor, as in the case of the Famine, the turning of a natural catastrophe to the brutal purposes of social engineering, the Holocaust was a death sentence leveled against every Jewish man, woman, and child under German rule. No exceptions. None. The full force and organizational power of the modern industrialized state were dedicated to bringing about the total eradication of the Jews. As terrible and as traumatic as the Famine was, as formative of all that followed in Irish and Irish-American history, it was not that.

What caused the potato famine that left so many dead of starvation and cholera in its wake? In his classic theoretical framework Diffusion of Innovations (2003, Free Press), the late communications scholar Everett M. Rogers draws on W.C. Paddock’s Our Last Chance to Win the War on Hunger:

The story begins a century earlier, when a new wonder food, the potato, was introduced from North America. Ireland’s climate was perfect for potato growing, and Ireland was relatively free from potato diseases and insects. Potato yields were abundant. The population began to increase from 2 million Irish in the 1700s…to 8 million in 1845.

Then, in 1845, a pathogen, Phytophthora infestans, arrived from America and wiped out the entire potato crop. Previously, during the long Atlantic crossing, often requiring a month or more, infected potatoes being carried to feed passengers had rotted, and the pathogen had died. But the new clipper ships made the transatlantic crossing so quickly, in twelve to fourteen days, that infected potatoes did not have time to rot and the pathogen survived the trip.

Modern man is slightly more aware of the human impact of technological advances. The Centers for Disease Control bombard us with dire warnings on a regular basis. We are cognizant of the reality that someone afflicted with SARS can step on a jetliner in Beijing on Monday morning, and by Tuesday evening half the population of New York City could be at risk. But in the 1840s…who knew? The Irish found out the hard way after an infected batch of seed potatoes ordered by Belgian farmers caused a pathogenic water mold blight to explode into a full-scale epidemic, ravaging potato crops across Western Europe before coming to a final, fatal stop at Ireland’s shores.

Why, one is compelled to inquire, did other countries fare the devastation better than the Emerald Isle? Simple: agricultural diversification. Ireland was a place “where the potato was neither staple nor supplement, but sustenance.” In measuring the impact of The Great Hunger, Quinn, as previously cited, would like the reader to believe that the laws of natural catastrophe were at work against the Irish, not eugenics or “ethnic violence” or the careless arrogance of the British Empire. He opines:

The formative impact of the Famine, it seems to me, was paid little more than lip service, usually in the form of ritualized indictments of British treachery. It’s always easier to assign blame for causes, I suppose, than to trace the profound, ordinary and subastral ways in which effects insinuate themselves into institutions and families, playing out across generations. If I beat this drum insistently, well, it’s because, through the decade of research and reflection that resulted in my first novel, I came to believe the beating was long overdue.

Those “ritualized indictments of British treachery” and easy assignations of blame that Quinn carelessly dismisses at his own peril are well-supported by accepted history. American economist and public policy activist Jeremy Rifkin observes in Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992, E.P. Dutton) that

The Celtic grazing lands of…Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonized…the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home…The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of Ireland…Pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.

The Irish Potato Famine, in final summation, was the result of the collision of unchecked technological advances and subjugation to a conquering monarchy. If the author intends to revise this “work in progress” he may be wise to consider these established realities.

Quinn is on solid ground when exploring the mass migration of the Irish to America. The Irish arrived in America en masse in the 1840s with no Horatio Alger myths of their own to apply to this new culture and environment. Their folklore was steeped in rural existence and yet in a single generation they evolved from the most rural people in Western Europe to the most urbanized in North America:

The utter unfamiliarity of the Irish with the routines and demands of city life, and the absence of any previous immigrant group to blaze a path, or at least offer some hint of how to act or what to do, put the Irish at a distinct disadvantage. They would spend a long time climbing out of what (historian and musicologist William H.) Williams describes as ‘the worst slums in American history.’

Climb out of the slums they did. Irish-Americans were an industrial army, providing much of the cheap labor that built America’s infrastructure of canals and railways. Before fully assimilating into the rich fabric of American society, they lived on the periphery and used their right to vote as a forceful wedge. Quinn’s central theme here is how the Irish stayed Irish,

How an immigrant group already under punishing cultural and economic pressures, reeling in the wake of the worst catastrophe in the nineteenth century, and plunged into the fastest industrializing society in the world, regrouped as quickly as it did; built its own far-flung network of charitable and educational institutions; preserved its own identity; and had a profound influence on the future of both the country it left and the one it came to. It was done imperfectly, for sure, and was marred by sins and stupidity, by mistakes and missed opportunities, but the wonder is that it was done at all.

One could easily apply the same sentiments to Quinn’s inquiry into the 150-year saga of Irish Americans: imperfect, marred by mistakes and personal opinion, but a history that is well-worth recording and remembering for current and future generations.