Nothing but an Unfinished Song

Denis O'Hearn
January 2006     ISBN: 156025842X

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. 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 riveting biography illuminates this enigmatic, controversial, and heroic figure with an enormous amount of new material based on primary research and interviews.

Denis O’Hearn was born in New Mexico and is of Irish and Native Alaskan (Aleut) ancestry. He was educated at the University of New Mexico and the University of Michigan. He moved to Belfast in the 1970s, where he was a student and a journalist. His articles for In These Times and the Guardian introduced the Irish "H-Blocks" prison conflict to the broad audience of progressives in the US. Since the mid-1990s he has taught at Queens University in Belfast, where he is professor of social and economic change. He was a Fulbright Scholar at University College Dublin in 1991-92 and, jointly with his work at Queens, he is now professor of sociology at the University of Binghamton in New York. Until recently he was chair of the West Belfast Economic Forum and a member of the Board of Governors of Scoil na Fuiseoige in Belfast. He lives in Belfast with his partner Annette and his daughters Sinéad and Caitríona.