Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died Through the Northern Ireland Troubles Book

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 FletcherRead More