Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
$7.99
Say Nothing
- A True Story of Murder and Memory In Northern Ireland
- By: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Narrated by: Matt Blaney
- Length: 14 hrs and 43 mins
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Politics & Activism
Publisher's Summary
Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2019, shortlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction 2019, a Time’s number one Best Nonfiction Book of 2019 and New York Times best-seller.
One night in December 1972, Jean McConville, a mother of 10, was abducted from her home in Belfast and never seen alive again. Her disappearance would haunt her orphaned children, the perpetrators of this terrible crime and a whole society in Northern Ireland for decades.
In this powerful, scrupulously reported book, Patrick Radden Keefe offers not just a forensic account of a brutal crime but a vivid portrait of the world in which it happened. The tragedy of an entire country is captured in the spellbinding narrative of a handful of characters, presented in lyrical and unforgettable detail.
A poem by Seamus Heaney inspires the title: 'Whatever You Say, Say Nothing'. By defying the culture of silence, Keefe illuminates how a close-knit Irish society fractured; how people chose sides in a conflict and turned to violence; and how, when the shooting stopped, some ex-combatants came to look back in horror at the atrocities they had committed, while others continue to advocate violence even today.
Say Nothing deftly weaves the stories of Jean McConville and her family with those of Dolours Price, the first woman to join the IRA as a front line soldier, who bombed the Old Bailey when she was barely out of her teens; Gerry Adams, who helped bring an end to the fighting but denied his own IRA past; Brendan Hughes, a fearsome IRA commander who turned on Adams after the peace process and broke the IRA's code of silence; and other indelible figures. By capturing the intrigue, the drama, and the profound human cost of the Troubles, the book presents a searing chronicle of the lengths that people are willing to go to in pursuit of a political ideal and the ways in which societies mend - or don't - in the aftermath of a long and bloody conflict.
©2018 Patrick Radden Keefe (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
Amazon Customer
excellent
Not usually my genre but found the historic detail of events FANTASTIC.
I am Australian and Female yet still found it a fantastic, well spoken narrative of ‘the troubles’
2 people found this helpful
Luke O’Regan
Haunting
When you have the space, time and peace of mind, listen to Matthew Blaney reading for you, “Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe on Audiobooks. It will transport your soul to The Falls and the Divis Flats and you’ll come to know the sorrowful tale of Dolours Price and her wee sister Marian. You’ll shed a tear at Brendan Hughes profound sense of abandonment by Adams… “what were we killing and dying for?”
You’ll learn what happened to Jean McConville whose death made orphans of her ten children.
The drink got Hughes and Price in the end. They tried in vain to drown and silence the daemons of wartorn memories. When the Republican leadership forsook the armed struggle many volunteers felt criminalised and devalued, having lived as brave heroes facing martyrdom. Most galling to those who served under him was Adam’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge membership of The ‘RA.
It’s powerful stuff, harrowing yet ultimately uplifting in that Dolours and Brendan are finally heard: be haunted by their plaintive, proud, defiant voices from the grave.
2 people found this helpful