Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

In 1972 a mother of 10 children, Jean McConville, was dragged from her home in Belfast Ireland and never seen again.  Keefe uses the murder of McConville as the center piece of his carefully researched history of "the Troubles" in Ireland that began with strife between Catholics and Protestants, and continued as a conflict between the "Republicans" who wanted to reunify North Ireland and Ireland, and the British government who wanted to maintain control in the region. Keefe also goes into a lot of detail about what happened to the main players in the conflict after the Good Friday agreement of 1998 that ended hostilities, and how their story eventually was revealed through an oral history project undertaken by Boston College.  

I was a young girl when many of the events in this book took place.  I remember hearing about bombings in Ireland in the news and vaguely understanding that religious conflict was at its root.  I decided to read this book so I could better understand what I barely understood as a kid.  This is a gripping tale and Keefe puts the reader right into the time, place, and events. The book is kind of divided into halves.  The first half tells the story of the conflict and the second half tells how the facts of the story came to light. It was interesting to see how the different leaders of the IRA dealt with the trauma of their past.  Some, like Delours Price,
gradually self-destructed because of guilt over what she had done, while others, like Gerry Adams, went on to live full and successful lives seemingly unaffected by the trauma. If you are interested in this book I highly recommend you listen to it as an audiobook.  The reader is the actor Matthew Blaney and he knows how to render the Irish colloquialisms with the right inflection to make them understandable. The book is long, and I am not sure I would have gotten through the second half if I hadn't enjoyed Blaney's accent so much. (464 p. 2019)