Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles - Hardcover

McKittrick, David; Kelters, Seamus; Feeney, Brian; Thornton, Chris

4.55

89 ratings by Goodreads

9781840182279: Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184018227X ISBN 13: 9781840182279

Publisher: Mainstream Publishing, 1999

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This volume is filled with passion and violence, with humanity and inhumanity. It is the story of the Northern Ireland troubles; it is not concerned with political bickering but with the lives of those who have suffered and the deaths which have resulted from more than three decades of conflict. The authors - three of them Belfast-born and the fourth an American - are journalists. Over a seven-year period they examined every death which was directly caused by the troubles. Their research involved interviewing witnesses, scouring published material and drawing on a range of investigative sources to produce this study. The book traces the origins of the conflict from the firing of the first shots, through the carnage of the 1970s and 1980s and up to the republican and loyalist ceasefires and beyond. All the casualties are here: the RUC officer, the young soldier, the IRA volunteer, the loyalist paramilitary, the Catholic mother, the Protestant worker, the new-born baby.

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Review:

We know that John Scullion, a Catholic shot dead in 1966, was the first. If only we could be sure that Charles Bennet, killed 33 years later, was the last. They are the opening and closing entries in this towering volume that documents the deaths of the 3600 men, women and children killed as a result of the troubles in Northern Ireland over the last 34 years. They are all here, IRA men and British soldiers, Loyalist terrorists and RUC officers, shoppers and tourists, mothers and children; those who made the news, those murdered unnoticed and unmourned by the outside world. In dispassionate, objective prose, the authors--three journalists and an academic--record the circumstances of every death and a detail about the dead. Here are the men who chose to fight, here are the people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. And here, in 1998, close to what we can only hope must be the end, are the dead of Omagh. In their story, as in others in this catalogue of evil, the humanity of those who rush to help the injured comes in moving contrast to the inhumanity of those behind the bomb. This book--a brilliant combination of the journalistic and the scholarly--will stand as a memorial to the dead. Would that it never requires a sequel. --Kim Fletcher

Review:

"The greatest single piece of scholarship in either journalism or historical studies that has ever been conducted in this country. In its encyclopedic detail, in its towering integrity and in its moral compassion, it could be the most influential study of Irish history that has ever been presented" (Kevin Myers Irish Times)

"There is not even space to do justice to the scholarly comprehensiveness, the magisterial even-handedness or the moral integrity of this astonishing book" (Robert McCrum, Literary Editor The Observer)

"The scrupulous, austere, secular litany that is Lost Lives is the greatest act of remembrance that has yet emerged. It restores, with its economical but vivid detail, the humanity behind the statistics" (Fintan O'Toole Irish Times)

"A devastating account of the price paid for peace. Read it and weep. I know I did, and without apology to the cynics" (Fergal Keane, BBC correspondent)

"The most influential reference book in Irish history" (Irish News)

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