Friday Reads: Say Nothing

We're back to our semi-regularly-scheduled Friday Reads! This week, Adam Pellman tells us about Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe:

We don't often know much about the global events that are happening during our childhood years. They're often too recent for us to learn about in school, and too far outside the sphere of our everyday existence to be of much concern to us. For me, this was true of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a 30-year conflict in which loyalist Protestants and British military troops were engaged in low-level warfare with nationalist Catholic factions such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). I remember news stories from my teenage years about car bombings in Belfast, and I've seen numerous films (such as '71, Bloody Sunday, Hunger, and The Crying Game) set against the backdrop of the Troubles, but I never took the time to learn the history of the conflict.

This book, which is available in the Reeves non-fiction collection, provided me with an opportunity to do just that. The book uses the story of the notorious 1972 abduction and murder of a widowed mother of ten, Jean McConville, as an entry point into a much larger history of the Troubles. The book strikes a good balance between political history and true crime, and I would recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about this part of recent history.