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Oct. 29th, 2024 11:06 pmStaring desperately down the barrel of my booklog backlog but there simply is no way out but through! So we'll begin with something I've already been talking about extensively in one of my groupchats, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Modern Ireland.
This book had been on my radar for a while after seeing several friends speak highly of it but what pushed it to the top of the list was the realization that I knew appallingly little about the Troubles, a topic that one might wish to be conversant with if one was to, say, hypothetically, be discussing a work of children's literature written in the seventies about an Irish child whose father is a prisoner of the British government.
Despite the fact that one of the people who'd recommended the book was a grad school classmate, I somehow had no idea that the inciting event for this indeed very informative book about the Provisional IRA and the early years of the Troubles -- its central structural conceit -- is one of the biggest archival scandals of the 2010s!
For those unfamiliar with the controversy (and I have no idea how familiar most people may be with the controversy, this is definitely a feldspars moment for me) what happened was that Boston College, a Catholic Jesuit university with its roots in Boston's Irish immigrant population, launched an oral history project about the Troubles that included hundreds of highly sensitive interviews with major players from both sides of the conflict. Despite the fact that in theory these interviews were supposed to remain closed and protected until the participants were safely dead, they were shortly thereafter subpoena'd by the British government in order to prosecute some of the participants, which nobody was able to prevent, because, it turns out, nobody involved in the project had ever consulted a lawyer.
The specific murder was that of Jean McConville, who was disappeared in 1972; the book intersperses the circumstances of her death and the aftermath for her ten children with the stories of Provisional IRA volunteers Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, who were both interviewed for the Boston College oral history project, as well as their colleague and now-politician-emeritus Gerry Adams. Despite being a very chunky book, it was a pretty quick read and in style reminded me a little bit of Killers of the Flower Moon -- both of them use some of the tools out of the nonfiction thriller box to examine larger structural and societal issues -- but whereas Killers of the Flower Moon sometimes got so True Crime-y in voice and structure that I found it distracting, Say Nothing felt much less to me like it was leaning on artificial suspense to keep the reader invested. The events and people under discussion were plenty interesting enough on their own merits.
... even without reckoning in the EXTREMELY INTERESTING TO ME PERSONALLY archives scandal. I truly do not want to overshadow the rest of the book, which really is a very compelling and pretty nuanced exploration of the early years of the Troubles and the sunk cost fallacy of violence, with my personal professional interests. However, I graduated archives school in 2013 and was industriously attending the conference circuit in 2014 and everyone was talking about this -- and now that I've read the book and learned more detail, I'm even more scandalized. You run an oral history project like this?!
This book had been on my radar for a while after seeing several friends speak highly of it but what pushed it to the top of the list was the realization that I knew appallingly little about the Troubles, a topic that one might wish to be conversant with if one was to, say, hypothetically, be discussing a work of children's literature written in the seventies about an Irish child whose father is a prisoner of the British government.
Despite the fact that one of the people who'd recommended the book was a grad school classmate, I somehow had no idea that the inciting event for this indeed very informative book about the Provisional IRA and the early years of the Troubles -- its central structural conceit -- is one of the biggest archival scandals of the 2010s!
For those unfamiliar with the controversy (and I have no idea how familiar most people may be with the controversy, this is definitely a feldspars moment for me) what happened was that Boston College, a Catholic Jesuit university with its roots in Boston's Irish immigrant population, launched an oral history project about the Troubles that included hundreds of highly sensitive interviews with major players from both sides of the conflict. Despite the fact that in theory these interviews were supposed to remain closed and protected until the participants were safely dead, they were shortly thereafter subpoena'd by the British government in order to prosecute some of the participants, which nobody was able to prevent, because, it turns out, nobody involved in the project had ever consulted a lawyer.
The specific murder was that of Jean McConville, who was disappeared in 1972; the book intersperses the circumstances of her death and the aftermath for her ten children with the stories of Provisional IRA volunteers Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, who were both interviewed for the Boston College oral history project, as well as their colleague and now-politician-emeritus Gerry Adams. Despite being a very chunky book, it was a pretty quick read and in style reminded me a little bit of Killers of the Flower Moon -- both of them use some of the tools out of the nonfiction thriller box to examine larger structural and societal issues -- but whereas Killers of the Flower Moon sometimes got so True Crime-y in voice and structure that I found it distracting, Say Nothing felt much less to me like it was leaning on artificial suspense to keep the reader invested. The events and people under discussion were plenty interesting enough on their own merits.
... even without reckoning in the EXTREMELY INTERESTING TO ME PERSONALLY archives scandal. I truly do not want to overshadow the rest of the book, which really is a very compelling and pretty nuanced exploration of the early years of the Troubles and the sunk cost fallacy of violence, with my personal professional interests. However, I graduated archives school in 2013 and was industriously attending the conference circuit in 2014 and everyone was talking about this -- and now that I've read the book and learned more detail, I'm even more scandalized. You run an oral history project like this?!
