Feed the Children First

The great Irish potato famine -- the Great Hunger -- was one of the worst disasters of the nineteenth century. Within seven years of the onset of a fungus that wiped out Ireland's staple potato crop, more than a quarter of the country's eight million people had either starved to death, died of disease, or emigrated to other lands. Photographs have documented the horrors of other cataclysmic times in history -- slavery and the Holocaust -- but there are no known photographs whatsoever of the Great Hunger.

In Feed the Children First, Mary E. Lyons combines first-person accounts of those who remembered the Great Hunger with artwork that evokes the times and places and voices themselves. The result is a close-up look at incredible suffering, but also a celebration of joy the Irish took in stories and music and helping one another -- all factors that helped them endure.

Mary E. Lyons is the author of many acclaimed and award-winning books that bring to life the people and places of history. Among them are: Letters from a Slave Girl: The Story of Harriet Jacobs; The Poison Place; and Dear Ellen Bee: A Civil War Scrapbook of Two Union Spies. Mary E. Lyons is a former librarian and reading teacher. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband, Paul Collinge, a dealer in used and rare books.