Say Nothing

👍🏼Pick It: if U2's “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is the extent of your knowledge concerning Northern Ireland.
👎🏼Skip It: if thick ‘n' rich journalism bores you.

I initially picked Say Nothing thinking the story of the mysterious disappearance and murder of Jean McConville would coddle my true crime cravings. So by the end of Chapter 3, largely dedicating to staging the developing conflict, I felt duped...but hooked.

The Troubles?
The IRA?
The Stickies?
The What?
The Who?
Here was major period of history reading like a revelation! Never touched, mentioned nor acknowledged in any one social studies class.

Before Say Nothing, I largely type-casted History as regurgitated black-and-white events, contained in dusty books, inked to yellowing pages, shoved on forgotten shelves. This book refreshed the genre with a curiosity to learn about the world around me, over the wall, over the pond.

The magnitude of history is hardly digestible for a fifth grader during a five-month learning frame, so I don't fault my K-18 history teachers for skimming or omitting chunks of happenings. However, this book spoke to the need for writers like Keefe to revive the stories that go unsung.

Keefe's ability to give the in-depth, decades-spanning scoop on the Troubles is stunning. Because of his careful narration, I closed the book with conviction that history class is still in session and happening now.

So to be considered active participants in this world, we must pick up books like this one to develop empathy and to stay cognizant of the shifting landscapes and consequential evolutions of countries and cultures outside our own.

I liked most of this book. It's not a part of history that I know much about. I think it did a reasonable job showing both sides of the conflict.

Really enjoyed this. Found the first half to be the best as it dragged just a bit in the second half.

5/5

Sunday, Bloody Sunday!

An absolute cracker. Even an ignorant little Anglo boy like me with no real knowledge of the Troubles could follow this, written so well and keeps a really complicated issue easy to follow. Time to buy 7 million more books about the Troubles!

Saying it's a true crime book sells it way too short. It is a non-fiction book that is rich in the research, sources, and facts, but keeps you engaged like a novel.

Really engaging, especially around the hunger strikes

Thrilling!

At first, I struggled to get into it. I think because of the plethora of names, locations, factions, etc., that are explored to set the scenery. Possibly because I knew absolutely nothing at all about The Troubles except whatever I've picked up from the odd Tom Clancy book/movie (and, thus, very probably less than nothing).

The book is exceptionally well paced, and the author threads the stories so delicately that when the pictures start to come together there are times when you can't help but sit upright.

The book explores themes of moral injury and ambiguous loss in ways I find deeply fascinating. More, the book explores the stories communities tell themselves and how factions interact with communities as mitigators and agitators. From page 402:

“In the intertwining lives of Jean McConville, Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams, I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalized in their uncompromising devotion to a cause, and about how individuals—and a whole society—make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect.”

A great opportunity, and there are plenty of things we can view as analogous re: how populations/communities warp around themselves.

Great read — would recommend!

4.5 really

This wasn't an easy read, but it was definitely a meaningful one. Incredibly well researched and written. Considering the subject, I can only guess at the effort it took to report on such a dark time in Irish history, but this succeeds in bringing the Troubles into stark detail.

Absolutely captivating from beginning to end. A well-crafted and well-researched story of a murder that simultaneously introduces readers to the history of the troubles and some of its most infamous characters.

I am of an age where The Troubles were a childhood background, where growing up agnostic a religious conflict appeared strange on not really comprehensible. When, later in life, i fell in love with [a:Adrian McKinty 12433 Adrian McKinty https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1584967497p2/12433.jpg] Sean Duffy series of novels set during troubles I immediately bookmarked this book to read when he recommended it.In today's polarized world I am in awe of how NI managed to actually step back from appalling levels of violence to actually give peace a chance. Adams does not come out of this book well but i cannot be impressed with how he managed to thread the needle to bring the Good Friday Agreement as an acceptable option to Northern Irish Republicans 20 years ago and that it still holds, albeit with many ongoing issues.This book is not about the GFA but is a history of the IRA but it is so well written (and from what I understand, researched) it gives the reader the basis to understand the magnitude of strife and thus the achievement of peace.

Such a well written book! I picked this book up every free moment I had. Keefe does a great job of telling the history of the troubles in Ireland through the disappearance and murder of Jean McConville. I never got lost in the details because of Keefe's gift of keeping the story alive. I just wish I had someone to discuss the book with!

I wasn't as well-informed about the Irish Troubles as I should have been, as it always seemed so remote and intractable to me. So this book, which is one of the best-written non-fiction books I've read–fills in a lot of details, including the names of key players and information about milestones in the history of the conflict and its ultimate resolution. It's a fascinating piece of reporting.

Highly recommended. Keefe does a wonderful job of delivering an impartial account of The Troubles and the evolution of the “conflict” (as the English insist on labelling their occupation) through the stories of several key figures, notably Gerry Adams who really seems like a sociopath to me now that I understand the backstory and I get why my father disliked him..

This book is not about the kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville, it is about Gerry Adams, Dolours and Marian Price, Brendan Hughes, and other big figures in the IRA and Provisional IRA. Pieces of Jean McConville's story, and that of her family, are dropped into the narrative at irregular intervals, disrupting the flow of both her story and the main story. I wish that Jean's story was separated out and made into its own book because I found it very compelling, and the story of the IRA/Provo bigwigs less so. I also didn't like how whenever a new person was introduced in the main story (IRA/Provo bigwigs story) we had to have the person's whole biography. It made for really jarring reading, taking me out of the flow of the story and into some pointless multi-page backstory, and then rushing me forward back into the flow with little more than the sense of “Ok, this guy is IRA/British secret service/other paramilitary”.

I like knowing more about Northern Ireland and the Troubles, but this book wasn't an enjoyable read.

Amazing account of The Troubles, a violent politico-military event which lasted from the late 1960's until the mid-1990's. It centers around the abduction, murder and disappearing of a widowed mother of 10, who was “disappeared” in the early 1970's. Seemingly balanced amongst the various participants of the war and emblematic of the fact that there isn't good vs evil in a revolutionary struggle and that all sides have at least figurative, if not literal blood on their hands.

Say Nothing starts out with the disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38 year old widow and mother of 10, who was dragged from her home in Belfast by a group of masked men and women in 1972 and never seen by her family again. But in order to tell the story of what happened to Jean McConville and her children, it's necessary to tell the story of the IRA, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the British Army in Belfast in the 20th century. So, after giving us the mystery of McConville's disappearance and the terrible plight of her children, Patrick Radden Keefe spends the bulk of the next 200 pages writing about the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the individuals who played important roles in the Provisional IRA through the 1970's and all the way up to the Good Friday Accord. This was not what I expected, but it was riveting, so I happily went along for the ride. Of course, the story does make its way back to Jean McConville, and other people who were “disappeared” during the Troubles.

As an American who knew about the Troubles growing up and romanticized the IRA, especially as a teenager, I appreciated how Keefe acknowledges that there was a sort of glamour associated with IRA fighters. His book shows clearly, though, how very brutal and unglamorous the conflict was, and many of the people in it as well. The present is equally complex. There is peace, but survivors are traumatized, the past has not been fully dealt with, and as more than one person in the book says, the IRA has not gone away.

Say Nothing has 65 pages of notes, a bibliography, and index. It is well researched and reads like a great piece of longform journalism, which it is.

I tend to not read non-fiction books but he wove the narratives so well together it was hard to put down.

Definitely lived up to the hype! I had only the most superficial knowledge about the Troubles before starting this, so I learned a great deal and was compelled to pause and spend some time looking people and topics up and reading more about the history of this time. I particularly liked the through line of the McConville case as the lens through which this history was viewed. Radden Keefe explains his research and writing process at the end, which I appreciated, and did well in giving people nuance while explaining their horrific actions and choices. The audiobook was well done, hope he reads for more books in the future.

Excellent navigation of the complicated palimpsest of the Troubles.

An informative, engrossing and disturbing account of the Northern Ireland “Troubles” of the 1970s-90s, centered around the long unsolved disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten children. I remember hearing about many violent deaths during that period but didn't know the details, so this filled in a lot of blanks. The book primarily depicts the actions of the Catholic Provisional IRA members (“Provos”) but doesn't shy away from the violence perpetrated by all sides. Keefe provides historical context, but focuses on a few key characters, which gives the book the feel of a novel/murder mystery.

Possibly the most interesting part - and the part I knew least about - took place after the ceasefire, when members of a secret project at Boston College interviewed many of the IRA participants, promising them their records would only be released after their deaths. Unfortunately nobody stopped to figure out exactly whose deaths that meant - each individual or everyone who participated. And years later as some of the Provos turned from violence to politics, there were high stakes about the long-held secrets that, if revealed, could solve the mystery of Jean McConville's disappearance.

I don't read a lot of non-fiction but I had heard raves about this book and I'm glad I took time away from my novels to learn about this tragic, violent period in our very recent history.

One of the most stunning pieces of narrative nonfiction I've ever read.

This book is excellent. It uses the disappearance of Jean McConville as a thread from which to hang the stories of former IRA members, historical context, and a lot of pain and suffering.

I found the IRA's unwelcome shift of a paramilitary organization fighting an unacknowledged war to a political party maintaining fragile, unsatisfying peace to be particularly interesting.

The bulk of this book is not about Jean McConville's disappearance and probably not a traditional ‘true crime' novel. But her story and the story of her children are often brought back at the perfect moment to frame the historical narrative perfectly.

A harrowing tale of violent struggle and, ultimately, no winners. The author did a remarkable job researching and presenting the history of the Troubles and ends with a surprise plot twist. An amazing book.