Balanced, but in the end, it’s impossible not to be moved by the conviction of Sands and his comrades.
A moment-by-moment chronicle of the Irish revolutionary’s political education in Gulag Belfast.
While sympathetic to Sands (1954–81), O’Hearn is frank about the controversial, often violent IRA actions in which the man participated. The biography’s main aim, writes O’Hearn (Sociology/Queen’s College, Belfast), is “to tell who Bobby Sands was and how he related to and was shaped by his time and place.” A product of the tumultuous ’60s in Ireland, the boy experienced the worst of the British colonial occupation. His family was driven from their home, and Sands was beaten and stabbed by Loyalist gangs simply for being a Catholic. He enlisted as an IRA volunteer, carrying out robberies that he justified as fundraising efforts. By the time Sands entered the Belfast prison system, he was one of the “political animals” at the most committed end of the spectrum of IRA detainees. Yet his ideas were still unformed, and jail became the place where he could think and read—everything from poetry to black humor, Che Guevara to Franz Fanon—as he sought for ways to encourage grassroots democracy and resistance to British rule. Jail also became a theater for symbolic expression: IRA members considered themselves political prisoners and would not accede to any procedure that labeled them criminals. They refused to wear prison clothing and resisted restrictions on their right to associate or to receive visits from friends and family. If it would force the authorities to recognize their political status, they were willing to die, and they did: Sands and nine others perished during a hunger strike in Belfast’s dreaded H-Block cells. The first to die, he became an international symbol of resistance yet remained a cipher. Who was he, and how had he come to give his life for the cause? Few knew, because Sands was incarcerated for most of that short life; O’Hearn’s account fills in many gaps.
Balanced, but in the end, it’s impossible not to be moved by the conviction of Sands and his comrades.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-842-X
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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