Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #634 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

James Delingpole, Mail on Sunday
'Dark, witty, grim, caustic, despairing, wise, searingly honest and beautifully written... The best informed and most exciting personal account of the Troubles ever published.'

Mary Kenny, Literary Review
'The best book you will ever read about Belfast in the 1970s... Ghastly, hilarious, black with humour, black with death and cruelty, and lucid with humanity.'

Tom Adair, Scotsman
'Livid and lucid... You almost feel you are walking those streets, taking hasty cover as a cannonade of machine gun fire barks fatally into the silence.'

Customer Reviews

Amazing!
This is very easy to read but certainlly not void of information and fasinating facts. Terrifying violence and written with amazing passion, it's fantastic.

Not for serious readers of Northern Ireland's recent past.
I do wish that I hadn't bought this book. I read only half of it and found that I couldn't continue. It was pure tat, self-promoting and so shallow. I shall give this book to someone I don't like!

"That was Belfast."
I have read countless books which have used the events of this era as their focus and theme. Having grown up on the fringes of south Belfast myself during the early to late-seventies, I don't think I have ever read such a balanced narrative on "the troubles" and the blinkered tribalism that fuelled them. Even though by the final chapter when Myers writes of "...the darkness of my time there" - and by then we know he means the despair of guilt at possible wrong decisions, a failed love affair which still haunts him, lost friends and general disillusionment at suddenly discovering your twenties are gone - this is nonetheless an uplifting narrative where the writer's appetite for life remains strong. True, for every humorous encounter with, say, a Swedish prostitute ("...how I learnt the "Excuse me" is whorish for goodbye forever...") there are several encounters with terrifying characters such as Rab Brown, the UVF psycopath, and the odious John McGuffin, the bar-room socialist and parasite. This is powerful writing. One gets the feeling that Myers has set out to exorcise his own ghosts. I hope he has succeeded.