History Corner: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this book, free of charge, from Doubleday Press, via netgalley, for review purposes on this blog. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it.

Here's another of the great Irish books, that are part of our Irish reading,

and this one is a MUST read!

Synopsis:

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.

Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

Review

Ask anyone you know about "the Troubles" and you may get some info on the IRA bombing places in England, and killing people. What you WON'T get is the history behind the Troubles and that that history goes almost back to the BEGINNING of Ireland as we know it (aka the British takeover of the island). I started reading this book 2 weeks before my daughters latest dance competition, so while there I was finishing it up, so I did some off the wall questioning, and found that even among Irish descended Americans, there is a severe lack of knowledge about the background and WHY the Irish SO identified with Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement. Speaking with people who recently emigrated from Ireland, there was a whole different take on the Troubles and one that I could actually understand, having read THIS book! 

This book is a LITERAL eye-opener! While it focuses on the 'modern' Troubles, aka 50s onward, with focus on 70s and 80s, the background history really allows the reader to truly understand, for the first time, exactly what led up to the greater divide and WHY there seemed to be only one resolution-violence. And U2's song "Sunday Bloody Sunday" finally made total sense to me as well! By weaving biographies and historical accounts into the tale, Patrick gives the reader both sides of the fence, and more importantly, why there was no coming together, until the violence had reached a zenith. How the IRA faction became Sinn Féin was something I had never understood, until reading this book either. 

Patrick really does an brilliant job in letting the reader make up their mind as to who was right, or who was wrong, and if their reasonings were justified, or not. You may end up seeing both sides and realizing much was inevitable. And while the story focus of the disappearance of Jean McConville and her children is the front runner of the book, Patrick weaves in the history of what lead up to it, and the personal involvements become as gripping as the disappearance itself. It is truly a book you do not want to put down, and that you can get lost in for hours and hours!

By the time you finish, you may well feel you've been though an entire semester course in Irish history! Poor Miss Grace, she has no idea yet that one of her electives in high school is going to be Irish History and the Correlations between American History! And I'm pretty sure THIS book is going to be her foundation text! As a current representative, and future Queen (odds on), for an Irish Parade Krewe, as well as an Irish dancer, she needs to be able to speak as to why there are actually MORE people with Irish blood in America, than in Ireland, that just quoting 'famine and immigration'. She needs a clearer understanding of WHY American immigration was seen as such a better choice (we had already defeated the British after all and achieved a Bill of Rights that has withstood the test of time), than staying in a homeland they loved. And in reading this book, she will also get a better understanding of AMERICAN civil rights, and what went right and wrong! 

If you are of Irish descent, or love history, this is a MUST read book! You may find yourself urging everyone YOU know to read it too! Do NOT miss this amazing book!

About the Author

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Review of Books. He received the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, for his story "A Loaded Gun," was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and is also the recipient of an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at the New America Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship.