Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #413450 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Synopsis
At seventeen, Bobby Sands was interested in girls, soccer, and music. Ten years later he led his fellow prisoners on a protest against repressive conditions in Northern Ireland's H-Block prisons that grabbed the world's attention. After sixty-six days of refusing to eat, Sands died on May 5, 1981. Parliaments across the world stopped for a minute's silence in his honor. Bobby Sand's remarkable life and death have made him an Irish Che Guevara. Nothing But an Unfinished Song is the first biography to properly describe the motivation of the hunger strikers, recreating this period of history from within the prison walls. This powerful book illuminates for the first time this enigmatic, controversial and heroic figure.

Customer Reviews

Former hunger striker welcomes book
All of us have a story to tell. There's few though whose life, cut short at 27 years of age, can be said to have impacted so dramatically on the course of Irish politics and to have become such an internationally recognised icon as Bobby Sands. Guerrilla fighter in the Irish Republican Army, he was elected a member of the British parliament shortly before his death on hunger strike in the H Blocks of Long Kesh/Maze Prison on 5 May 1981.

I shared a prison wing with Bobby for nine months in 1979. Later I joined the hunger strike that he had just died on. I approached Denis O'Hearn's biography of Bobby therefore with a little trepidation. I should not have been concerned. It is an excellent book. It tells not just the story of Bobby, the prison protest and hunger strikes but accurately captures the atmosphere of the prison - the good times and bad, the hopes and despair, the pain, the joy and the totally selfless love that is rarely witnessed between a group of males. The strength of the book is that O'Hearn does not attempt to tell what he thinks happened behind prison walls (as other academics have) or to interpret events within his own ideological paradigm. Instead he facilitates others - friends, associates and comrades of Bobby - to tell of the person they knew and allows that person to become alive and vibrant on every page.

Most importantly, the book traces the development of a very ordinary, young, politically naive, high-spirited boy from a working class background on the outskirts of Belfast to the highly politicised, articulate, prolific, competent revolutionary that he became in later years. In this way O'Hearn informs a new generation of political activists in Ireland and elsewhere that they too can become a 'Bobby Sands' but hopefully never have to make the life and death decisions that he was faced with.

This year, the 25th anniversary of the hunger strike, it is timely for this biography to appear. It demonstrates the global interest that is retained in events that happened over a period of 217 days in 1981 when ten men died one after the other in prison cells in a struggle to be treated as the political prisoners they were. No wonder that states tremble before the power of such an idea that cannot be conquered, quenched, bought off or tortured into submission. No wonder that from the lips of oppressed peoples around the world the name, Bobby Sands, is uttered with such fondness and admiration.

An Inspiring Life Story
I was attending secondary school in West Belfast when Bobby Sands gave his life on hunger strike for the political recognition of the Republican struggle in Ireland. In his life and by his death he transformed politics in my society and became an inspirational and internationally respected figure. I later became aware of his transcendent poetry, all the more remarkable for being written in a prison 'tomb',and his songs that became national standards in the recordings of Christy Moore. But I knew very little about the man who became an icon of the Irish struggle for self-determination, the hunger-striker who became a member of the British Parliament while he lay in a prison hospital

Denis O'Hearn has put this to rights with a meticulously researched account of Sands' short life that included community and military activism and a harrowing journey through a gruelling and oppressive prison system. Through sheer bloody-mindedness, mental and physical resolve, and the capacity to recognise 'opportunities' in the most brutal forms of detention, Sands changed the trajectory of Irish politics. O'Hearn reveals a character full of ceaseless energy, buoyancy, sensitvity as well as political vision in a brisk, gripping and deeply moving account of Sands' life.

While providing a full and informative account of the early days of the 'troubles' in Ireland, this book also challenges complacency, urges activisim and rejects thinking within the narrow confines of mainstream political discourse. Bobby Sands, the activist, has been revealed to a new generation and renewed to those who grew up in that period of immense change.

Inspirational
This book is a remarkable achievement. With great skill and sensitivity the author pieces together the character and politics of the most famous IRA fighter of modern times. The book is thoroughly researched and a great accomplishment considering that most of Bobby Sands political development and struggles took place behind bars in the notorious H-Blocks of Long Kesh. It is a hard book to put down but at times I had to, as the author takes you right inside the most traumatic of episodes associated with the long years of protest, culminating in hunger strike and death. Learn something new on every one of the four hundred pages. No clichés here. Just rock solid research.