Books That Changed My Life, Vol. 1: Ten Men Dead

"See here how everything lead up to this day"

Max & I with Laurence at Fish Shop (~2021?).

Have you ever read a book that has stayed with you, or led you in a direction you may never have traveled if you hadn’t read it? I mean really changed you–and not in the sense that it grabbed ahold of your heart and stayed with you for a long time (though this is another precious gift that reading continues to give). 

One of the first books that had an outsized impact on me was something I read when I was about 13 or 14. It’s called Ten Men Dead and was written by a South African journalist named David Beresford. The book tells the story of Bobby Sands and the 1981 Irish hunger strikes. 

I can’t recall exactly how I found the book (or how it found me), but it was probably the first book I read about the political conflict in the north of Ireland. As I’ve mentioned before, my father grew up in Tullamore, County Offaly, and while I had a lot of exposure growing up to Irish history, most of it was of the Michael Collins variety and not so much of the more recent era of the Irish freedom struggle. It may sound strange to Americans, given that the island of Ireland is so relatively small, but Irish people from the south are generally pretty removed from what happens in the north. Case in point: an Irish Times poll from 2022 found that two thirds (!) of people in the Republic do not have any friends who live in the north of Ireland. The same would be true of my family, who came to the US a generation earlier.

And so the politics of the north were new to me. Even if you’re not familiar with the details of the 1981 hunger strike, chances are you’ve heard of Bobby Sands. Bobby was the first of ten men to die in Long Kesh prison in 1981 for the right to be treated as a political prisoner. 

As a quick bit of background: The British government withdrew political status in 1976 as part of their policy of criminalization, sparking a years-long “blanket protest” in which Irish republican political prisoners refused to wear a prison uniform, remaining naked with just a blanket to cover themselves. The decision to begin a hunger strike was taken a few years later, to amplify their campaign. Those who participated had five main demands: the right not to wear a prison uniform; the right to free association; the right not to do prison work; the right of one visit, letter, and parcel per week; and the restoration of any remission lost due to protest. 

The hunger strike has a long background in Ireland which predates its use for the freedom struggle. Beresford explains: 

The earlier records place its origins in medieval Ireland where, as troscad (fasting on or against a person) or cealachan (achieving justice by starvation), it had a place in the civil code, the Senchus Mór. The code specified the circumstances in which it could be used to recover a debt, or right a perceived injustice, the complainant fasting on the doorstep of the defendant. If the hunger striker was allowed to die the person at whose door he starved himself was responsible for his death and had to pay compensation to his family. It is probable that such fasting had particular moral force at the time because of the honor attached to hospitality and the dishonor of having a person starving outside one’s house. 

Makes you think about the history of hospitality, doesn’t it? Not to mention the warmth and depth of the Irish variety. But that’s the topic for another essay.

The story itself is powerful, inspiring, and heart-wrenching; it’s a great read, no matter how interested you are in Irish history in general. But what it did for me was served as a catalyst for a growing curiosity in global justice struggles, and set me off on an intellectual adventure, reading about everything from the American Indian Movement to the Black Panthers to the Chicano movement and beyond. I would eventually expand my knowledge by studying genocide, reparations, and movements for truth and justice. 

Later, during college, I traveled to the north of Ireland for the first time and was confronted with an experience of living history I had not expected. I walked into a café on the Falls Road and there was Gerry Adams having coffee with his friends and neighbors. Tom Hartley, who was Liam Óg in the book, served as a mentor to me for a while, introducing me to people and bringing me to cultural events in West Belfast. I saw Bik McFarlane play music at a pub. And around this time, I met Laurence McKeown, who was on the strike with Sands and has since become a friend. I was a child when I read the book, and here were the cast of characters just going about their daily lives. It was surreal, to say the least.  

Tom & Gerry (~2006?)

It can be hard to capture emotional intensity on paper, and even for a writer who is well versed at this, nothing really compares to meeting someone in context, in their own community.

Earlier this summer, I was reminded quite abruptly of how impactful this book was to the development of my political analysis as well as the subsequent trajectory of my life. I got choked up when introducing Laurence as one of our guest speakers during our Writing the Next World retreat in Connemara in June–the first time this has happened to me in a professional setting. And yes, it was while sharing the most harrowing part of his life’s journey that my voice caught in my throat. Laurence went 70 days without food before going into a coma. He would have been the 11th person to die if not for the intervention of his family; the hunger strike was ultimately called off a short time later. 

But it wasn’t just that, I quickly came to realize–not that I needed an excuse as to why I was so emotional. If I had not read Ten Men Dead in junior high, I probably wouldn’t have been in that room, with Autumn and adrienne and Max and all of our incredible new writer friends. And thus far, the work I have been doing with Bog & Thunder has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life.

Makes me think a bit about the song “Black Peter” by the Dead: “See here how everything lead up to this day / And it’s just like any other day that’s ever been”