The Great Hunger is the definitive account of one of the worst disasters in world history: the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. Within five years, one million people died of starvation. Emigrants by the hundreds of thousands sailed for America and Canada in small, ill-equipped, dangerously unsanitary ships. Some ships never arrived; those that did carried passengers already infected with and often dying of typhus.

The Irish who managed

Lewis Thomas has been said to be a philosopher who uses the language of biology. His fascinating observations on the quirkiness of the world's infinite creations causes listeners to ponder the workings of the cosmos through the most microscopic of life forms.

The medusa, a tiny jellyfish that lives on the ventral surface of a sea slug found in the Bay of Naples, becomes a metaphor for eternal issues of life and death as Thomas further extends