This popular book from 2018 is about the Provisional IRA (commonly known as "the Provos") and the murder of a mother of 10 children during "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s.
Very well-written and suspenseful, this history of the Troubles, and the political violence and terrorist groups of the period (as experienced by a number of the Provisional IRA leaders, members, defectors and family members), was made possible in part due to confessions made by several of the Provos as part of a long-term history project at a major Boston university.
The participants in the study who provided testimony to the project were promised their words would be held in secret until the participants were all dead. That promise failed, however, when U.S. courts intervened on behalf of IRA victims and Irish police investigators, and opened some of the history project files, adding to the climate of mistrust, fear and retribution among the people, organizations and events of the period.
The author interviewed many of the key players, as well as the family members of victims of IRA terrorism, and particularly spotlighted the role and activities of Jerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein (the Provos' political front group), which was a recurring topic throughout the narration.
This is probably one of the best and most moving histories of that bloody period, one that describes clearly the terrible personal costs of living and trying to survive in a civil war zone.
Given the increasingly open advocacy by some in our own society for the idea that insurrection, religious and ethnic intolerance, paramilitary violence and civil war are what we need here in the United States, it can be read as a stark cautionary tale of what that experience actually feels like, and of the harm it inflicts on all those forced to live through it, regardless of which side they're on. Recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment