POTATO POLITICS
Mitt Romney’s running mate is making the same economic mistakes that hurt his forefathers in the Great Famine, writes John Kelly.
John Kelly, whose bestseller The Great Mortality (HarperCollins, 2005), was about the 1347 Black Death, is the author of The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People, which will be published by Henry Holt in the U.S. (and Faber and Faber in the UK) on August 21, 2012. It has garnered considerable advance praise, from President Bill Clinton (who calls the book “a cautionary tale for all who would risk calamity—human, economic, or ecological—in the name of scoring an ideological victory”) and numerous historians. He will soon begin work on The Year of No Summer, about the British decision not to surrender in spring-through-autumn 1940, for Scribner’s.