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Title: Good reference, but Prof. Ignatiev overreaches
Review: This book is useful as a catlogue of many important and interesting events, and students will find it a handy reference tool. However, Prof. Ignatiev would have us believe that the Irish, in their natural state, were pure and untainted by bigotry, but that contact with America somehow caused them to become racist. This is untenable at best. He could have argued his thesis more effectively in a shorter essay. Short on analysis, the book is merely an interesting laundry list of riots and other events, and his many anecdotes do not do much to advance his argument. Nonetheless, the work is an interesting read and should prove useful to students.
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