Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair / Edition 1

by Padraig O'Malley

Overview

"A book equal to the pity and terror of its subject, Padraig O'Malley simplifies nothing and scrutinizes everything. This is not only a heartfelt narrative but a sustained exercise of moral and political intelligence".--Seamus Heaney

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900807002093
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	10/28/1991
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

Editorial Reviews

During 1981, 10 IRA prisoners died in hunger strikes as they sought status as political prisoners; among them was unseated Parliament member Bobby Sands, who assumed heroic dimensions at home and abroad. O'Malley ``assembles strands of elitism, nationalism and the peculiar sanction of the dead into a powerful and passionate chronicle of a people's yearning,'' said PW. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In March 1981, Bobby Sands began a hunger strike that led to his death 66 days later. One by one, nine other Irish Republicans followed him to their deaths as the whole world watched. O'Malley (senior associate, the John W. McCormack Institute, U. of Massachusetts at Boston) portrays the course of the hunger strikes and their meaning for the Irish people. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

...[E]loquent and haunting...

New York Times Books of the Century

In an eloquent and haunting book, O'Malley makes the fanaticism of [the hunger strikers] and their supporters, the obdurate and morally discredited tactics of the British Government and the hopeless combat of the Protestant and Roman Catholic factions in the Northern Ireland struggle explicable, and exposes the politics behind it. —The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher