This is the best-selling biography of the IRA resistance fighter and hunger-striker, Bobby Sands. In this updated, new edition, Denis O'Hearn draws from a wealth of interviews with friends, comrades, fellow prisoners and prison wardens, to provide a faithful and shocking insight into life in Northern Ireland's H-Block prisons, an exploration of the motivations and thoughts of the Republican strikers and the story of one of the world's most radical, inspirational figures. Following his journey from its very beginnings - an ordinary boy from a working-class background in Belfast to a highly politicised, articulate revolutionary whose death in HM Prison Maze sent reverberations around the world, Bobby Sands: Nothing But An Unfinished Song captures the atmosphere of the time and the vibrancy of the man: a militant anti-imperialist who held on to his humanity despite living through a bitter, ugly struggle.

motw/Bobby Sands_ Nothing but an Unf - Denis O'Hearn.pdf

Nothing but an unfinished song : Bobby Sands, the Irish hunger striker who ignited a generation

Bobby Sands - New Edition: Nothing But an Unfinished Song

Adobe InDesign CC 2015 (Macintosh)

O'Hearn, Denis;

Nation Books ; Distributed by Publishers Group West

Osberton Productions Ltd

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

New York, [Berkeley, Calif, ©2006

New edition, London, 2016

2022

producers:
Adobe PDF Library 15.0

Memory of the World Librarian: Slowrotation

At seventeen Bobby Sands was interested in music, girls, and soccer. Ten years later he led his fellow prisoners on a protest that grabbed the world's attention. Bobby Sands turned twenty-seven on a hunger strike, after spending almost nine years in prison because of his activities as a member of the Irish Republican Army. When he died on May 5, 1981, on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike against repressive conditions in Northern Ireland's H-Block prisons, parliaments across the world stopped for a minute's silence in his honor. Nelson Mandela followed his example and led a similar hunger strike in South Africa. Bobby Sands's remarkable life and death have made him the Irish Che Guevera. He is an enduring figure of resistance whose life has inspired millions around the world. But until the publication of Nothing but an Unfinished Song no book has adequately explored the motivation of the hunger strikers, nor recreated this period of history from within the prison cell. Denis O'Hearn's biography, which contains an enormous amount of new material based on primary research and interviews, illuminates for the first time this enigmatic, controversial, and heroic figure

Cover 1
Contents 6
Foreword to the New Edition by Mumia Abu-Jamal 10
Preface to the New Edition 14
Prelude 20
1. Growing Up in Utopia 26
2. Violence and Anger 34
3. Into the IRA 42
4. A Change of Scene 50
5. A Trip to the South 64
6. Prison 70
7. Things Get Hot 84
8. Learning to Rebel 94
9. Leaving Long Kesh 114
10. Putting it into Practice 122
11. A Bad Day in Dunmurry 138
12. Castlereagh 152
13. Back to Prison 168
14. Solitary Confinement 182
15. On the Blanket 190
16. Escalating the Protest 204
17. H6: Building Solidarity Within 236
18. H6: Extending the Protest 252
Plate Section 258
19. Towards the Inevitable 288
20. Hunger Strike 316
21. Step by Step 344
22. The End 374
23. The Beginning 412
Notes 428
Acknowledgments 462
Index 466

Published on the 35th anniversary of Sands' death, this powerful biography illuminates his life and political impact.

2025-10-27