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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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