Bobby Sands: Writings from Prison - Softcover

Sands, Bobby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1570981132 ISBN 13: 9781570981135

Publisher: UNKNO, 1997

Synopsis

Bobby Sands was twenty-seven years old and sixty-six days on hunger strike when he died in the H Blocks of Long Kesh in Northern Ireland, on 5 May 1981. The young IRA Volunteer, who had spent the last nine years of his short life in prison, was world-famous by the time of his death, having been elected to the British parliament and having withstood political and moral pressures to abandon his fast. The hunger strike was aimed at rebutting the British government's attempts to criminalize the struggle for Irish freedom by changing the status of Sands and his fellow cellmates from political to criminal status. While behind bars, Sands secretly wrote on toilet paper and cigarette papers with the refill of a cheap pen that he kept hidden inside his body. These writings were then smuggled out of prison. With dry humor, they chart, in prose and poetry, a man's attempt to preserve his identity against freezing cold, unimaginable filth, appalling beatings and numbing boredom. He conjures up vividly the enclosed hell of Long Kesh, the harassment, and the humiliatingly invasive searches. Bobby Sands and his comrades were gripped by an iron system that held them at torture-point and yet their courage never faltered.

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Reviews

It is 15 years since Sands, the 27-year-old leader of IRA prisoners in Belfast's Long Kesh Prison who was elected to the British Parliament while behind bars, became the first of 10 prisoners to die of self-imposed hunger, protesting the Thatcher government's treatment of IRA inmates as criminal, not political, prisoners. Fleeting hopes for peace in the mid-'90s and recent books (e.g., Before the Dawn by Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, who contributes a foreword here) and films (particularly Some Mother's Son, which portrays the mothers' campaign to save the hunger strikers) increase the appeal of Sands' prison writings. Of this book, the longest section, "One Day in My Life," details the prisoners' treatment; the other, "Skylark Sing Your Lonely Song," includes poetry, essays, and the diary Sands kept for the first 17 days of the fast (he died on day 66). Though Sands won't replace Yeats or Shaw in the Irish canon, his reflections have moments of eloquence that will appeal to readers concerned about Northern Ireland's "troubles." Mary Carroll

Edition details

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1570981132
• ISBN 13: 9781570981135
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 239