Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78483 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1648 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
We know that John Scullion, a Catholic shot dead in 1966, was the first. If only we could be sure that Charles Bennet, killed 33 years later, was the last. They are the opening and closing entries in this towering volume that documents the deaths of the 3600 men, women and children killed as a result of the troubles in Northern Ireland over the last 34 years. They are all here, IRA men and British soldiers, Loyalist terrorists and RUC officers, shoppers and tourists, mothers and children; those who made the news, those murdered unnoticed and unmourned by the outside world. In dispassionate, objective prose, the authors--three journalists and an academic--record the circumstances of every death and a detail about the dead. Here are the men who chose to fight, here are the people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. And here, in 1998, close to what we can only hope must be the end, are the dead of Omagh. In their story, as in others in this catalogue of evil, the humanity of those who rush to help the injured comes in moving contrast to the inhumanity of those behind the bomb. This book--a brilliant combination of the journalistic and the scholarly--will stand as a memorial to the dead. Would that it never requires a sequel. --Kim Fletcher

Synopsis
A work filled with passion and violence, with humanity and inhumanity. It is the story of the Northern Ireland troubles told through the lives of those who have suffered and the deaths which have resulted from the conflict. The authors - three of them Belfast-born and the fourth an American - are award-winning journalists. Over a seven-year period they examined every single death which was directly caused by the troubles. Their research has seen them interview witnesses, scour published material and draw on a huge range of investigative sources. "Lost Lives" traces the origins of the conflict from the firing of the first shots, through the carnage of the 1970s and 1980s and up to the republican and loyalist ceasefires and beyond. All the casualties are here: the RUC officer, the young soldier, the IRA volunteer, the loyalist paramilitary, the Catholic mother, the Protestant worker, the new-born baby. Each account is impossible to ignore.

From the Author
Reviews of Lost Lives
"Reading Lost Lives, the same feelings come back again and again - pity, anger, despair, but perhaps most of all the powerful conviction that there has to be a better future than this."

- Tony Blair

"A devastating account of the price paid for peace. Read it and weep. I know I did, and without apology to the cynics."

- BBC correspondent Fergal Keane

"It is majestic and consoling. It is the first book of its kind, the only one ever, anywhere in the world, to document every single person to die in a specific conflict. This book is an act of redemption. It will live forever."

- Nell McCafferty

"A monumental book, the most affecting yet written about the troubles. It is a reclamation of the thousands of ordinary lives that otherwise would have been lost to history."

- the Observer

"The scrupulous, austere secular litany that is Lost Lives is the greatest act of remembrance that has yet emerged. It restores, with its economical but vivid detail, the humanity behind the statistics."

- Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times

"No other book will have its enduring power. Sombre, humane, and awesome in its scope and diligence, Lost Lives is the most important book of the year. Nothing else comes close."

- Hot Press magazine, Dublin

"Lost Lives is the most poignant, unforgettable testimony to what violent amnesia can do to human lives. It stands as the most morally compelling argument terrorists have yet faced against a return to war."

- The Sunday Telegraph

"Quite extraordinary ... there is not the space to do justice to the scholarly comprehensiveness, the magisterial evenhandedness or the moral integrity of this astonishing book."

-Robert McCrum, literary editor, the Observer

"A breathtaking feat of investigative scholarship, compiled with intelligence and compassion."

- Maurice Walsh, the New Statesman

"A huge, sorrowful, brilliant book, to be read sparingly, slowly and with reverence. Lost Lives is a magnificent achievement."

- The Sunday Tribune

"A book of the dead, but also a book of resurrection. It is a crowning achievement for the authors, who have undertaken a massive task with litle hope of recompense. This is public-service journalism at its finest."

- John O'Farrell

"This may be the most important and significant book of the year. Its genius, the unique and precious insight it offers, is a way of seeing behind the headlines and into the lives and deaths of ordinary people."

- The Independent on Sunday

"Possibly the most important book to emerge from the long years of violence in Northern Ireland."

- Mary Holland

"This labour of Hercules will be in research libraries worldwide and on the bookshelf of many a shattered home. It is a fitting and enduring memorial to a pain which should never have been."

- The Belfast Telegraph

"This book is more than a memorial. It is a powerful series of parables on the absolute futility of violence. It should be in every school in the land, with a fresh page turned every day."

- Irish Independent

"A superb piece of work. I know of no comparable work on any other conflict, none to match Lost Lives in comprehensiveness and detail."

- Professor Paul Wilkinson, University of St Andrews

"We beg our readers to read this bible of the troubles. It will make you weep, and make our political and paramilitary leaders realise that the only way forward is peace."

- The Sunday People

"Brilliant."

- Professor Paul Bew, Queen's University, Belfast

"This is THE book of the troubles. It deserves the highest praise possible."

- Fortnight magazine, Belfast.

Customer Reviews

Totally engrossing
I received this book as a christmas present, much to my family's amazement. But as they browsed through it after our christmas dinner they were all drawn into it's web.

This book provides an account of each troubles related death, beginning in 1966 then year by year. Each year begins with a brief statement of fact about the state of play in that year and then proceeds to detail each person who lost their life, along with a factual based account of the circumstances.

It cleverly cross references other related entries. Before you know it you are caught up in the web going from an account of the hunger strikes to the shooting of three IRA members in Gibraltar to Michael Stone's attack on an IRA funeral and the subsequent murder of two soldiers at another funeral. And so it goes on.

One line from the introduction of this book summed in up for me it is "an account of what happens when a community decides to resolve its differences through violence".

I am sure there are ommissions, inaccuracies and mistakes but it is a must read for anyone interested in the history of the troubles and who wishes to discover more about the human cost of the conflict.

Not just a book - but a valuable memorial
I have to say that when I lift this book from it's space on the shelf, I always find it hard to stop reading it and to put it down.

As I read through the chronological order, I can often remember what I was doing at that time, and I can often recollect hearing about the victims, often briefly mentioned in dispassionate news broadcasts, with little time spent putting any of it into context. This is where the book re-dresses that inbalance. With even the smaller paragraph entries, the victim becomes someone - taken too early and before their time.

This is a masterful piece of work that deserves to be applauded. It also deserves to be in every school library in Northern Ireland.

Essential reading
I haven't finished this. I never will. It is too heart-rending. It lists 3697 victims of the Troubles, including not only those who died as a direct result of violent acts, but also others whose deaths, ostensibly due to natural causes, was obviously related to the violence.

The gut-wrenching thing is the sheer pointlessness of it all. The bloke who worked for the Queen as a royal coachman, out bird-watching one day, killed by the British army in crossfire in a battle with the IRA. The Unionist councillor, blown up in his car, on his way out of a meeting where he had asked fellow councillors to show a mark of respect to a Catholic victim of Loyalists a few days before.

I found I had forgotten so much of this. It's all terrible, all difficult to read. The worst of all are the stories of children like the little girl killed in the Omagh bomb at the age of 20 months, as her mother was buying her shoes for her uncle's wedding where she was to be a flower girl.

Grim though it is, I am really glad that the authors went to the trouble of compiling all this information. Putting everyone in context, all in one book, sorted only by chronological order, is a reminder that whatever the grand historical rights and wrongs, death is death and all who died left loved ones behind them. I wish this kind of survey could be done for other conflicts.