Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died Through the Northern Ireland Troubles [Hardcover]

We know that John Scullion, a Catholic shot dead in 1966, was the first. If only we could be sure that Charles Bennet, killed 33 years later, was the last. They are the opening and closing entries in this towering volume that documents the deaths of the 3600 men, women and children killed as a result of the troubles in Northern Ireland over the last 34 years. They are all here, IRA men and British soldiers, Loyalist terrorists and RUC officers, shoppers and tourists, mothers and children; those who made the news, those murdered unnoticed and unmourned by the outside world. In dispassionate, objective prose, the authors--three journalists and an academic--record the circumstances of every death and a detail about the dead. Here are the men who chose to fight, here are the people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. And here, in 1998, close to what we can only hope must be the end, are the dead of Omagh. In their story, as in others in this catalogue of evil, the humanity of those who rush to help the injured comes in moving contrast to the inhumanity of those behind the bomb. This book--a brilliant combination of the journalistic and the scholarly--will stand as a memorial to the dead. Would that it never requires a sequel. --Kim Fletcher --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This is a unique work filled with passion and violence, with humanity and inhumanity. It is the story of Northern Ireland troubles told as never before; it is not concerned with the political bickering buth with the lives of those who have suffered and deaths which have resulted from more than three decades of conflict.

The authors - four of them Belfast-born and the fifth an American - are journalists and historians. For over a decade, they have examined every single death that was directly caused by the troubles. Their research has seen them interview witnessess, scour published material and draw on a huge range of investigative sources to produce a work of epic proportions. Never before has conflict anywhere in the world been subjected to such meticulous scrutiny.

Lost Lives traces the origins of the conflict from the firing of the first shots, through the carnage of the 1970s and 1980s to the republican and loyalist ceasefires and beyond. All the casualties are here: the RUC officer, the young soldier, the IRA volunteer, the loyalist paramilitary, the Catholic mother, the Protestant worker, the newborn baby. Each account is impossible to ignore.

As a reference book, Lost Lives is indispensable; as a landscape of history painted in fine detail it is unique. For anyone interested in Northern Ireland - or in the human cost of conflict everywhere - this is destined to be the defining work.

Reviews of Lost Lives
"Reading Lost Lives, the same feelings come back again and again - pity, anger, despair, but perhaps most of all the powerful conviction that there has to be a better future than this."

- Tony Blair

"A devastating account of the price paid for peace. Read it and weep. I know I did, and without apology to the cynics."

- BBC correspondent Fergal Keane

"It is majestic and consoling. It is the first book of its kind, the only one ever, anywhere in the world, to document every single person to die in a specific conflict. This book is an act of redemption. It will live forever."

- Nell McCafferty

"A monumental book, the most affecting yet written about the troubles. It is a reclamation of the thousands of ordinary lives that otherwise would have been lost to history."

- the Observer

"The scrupulous, austere secular litany that is Lost Lives is the greatest act of remembrance that has yet emerged. It restores, with its economical but vivid detail, the humanity behind the statistics."

- Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times

"No other book will have its enduring power. Sombre, humane, and awesome in its scope and diligence, Lost Lives is the most important book of the year. Nothing else comes close."

- Hot Press magazine, Dublin

"Lost Lives is the most poignant, unforgettable testimony to what violent amnesia can do to human lives. It stands as the most morally compelling argument terrorists have yet faced against a return to war."

- The Sunday Telegraph

"Quite extraordinary ... there is not the space to do justice to the scholarly comprehensiveness, the magisterial evenhandedness or the moral integrity of this astonishing book."

-Robert McCrum, literary editor, the Observer

"A breathtaking feat of investigative scholarship, compiled with intelligence and compassion."

- Maurice Walsh, the New Statesman

"A huge, sorrowful, brilliant book, to be read sparingly, slowly and with reverence. Lost Lives is a magnificent achievement."

- The Sunday Tribune

"A book of the dead, but also a book of resurrection. It is a crowning achievement for the authors, who have undertaken a massive task with litle hope of recompense. This is public-service journalism at its finest."

- John O'Farrell

"This may be the most important and significant book of the year. Its genius, the unique and precious insight it offers, is a way of seeing behind the headlines and into the lives and deaths of ordinary people."

- The Independent on Sunday

"Possibly the most important book to emerge from the long years of violence in Northern Ireland."

- Mary Holland

"This labour of Hercules will be in research libraries worldwide and on the bookshelf of many a shattered home. It is a fitting and enduring memorial to a pain which should never have been."

- The Belfast Telegraph

"This book is more than a memorial. It is a powerful series of parables on the absolute futility of violence. It should be in every school in the land, with a fresh page turned every day."

- Irish Independent

"A superb piece of work. I know of no comparable work on any other conflict, none to match Lost Lives in comprehensiveness and detail."

- Professor Paul Wilkinson, University of St Andrews

"We beg our readers to read this bible of the troubles. It will make you weep, and make our political and paramilitary leaders realise that the only way forward is peace."

- The Sunday People

"Brilliant."

- Professor Paul Bew, Queen's University, Belfast

"This is THE book of the troubles. It deserves the highest praise possible."

- Fortnight magazine, Belfast. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

David McKittrick has been the Ireland correspondent of The Independent since 1986 and was named correspondent of the year in 1999 by BBC2's What the Papers Say. He has won a number of other awards during more than 20 years of reporting on Northern Ireland, among them the Christopher Ewart-Biggs memorial prize for the promotion of peace and understanding in Ireland. His publications include four collections of his journalism. Seamus Kelters is an assistant news editor with the BBC in Belfast. He has also worked as a producer with BBC Northern Ireland's political unit and its current affairs programme Spotlight. Before joining the BBC he was a senior reporter with the Irish News where he specialised in security-related stories. He has written a book on Gaelic games. Brian Feeney, who holds a doctorate in Irish history, lives in Belfast and is a senior lecturer at a teacher-training college there. An experienced political commentator, he writes a weekly column for a local newspaper and was formerly a city councillor for almost a decade. Widely travelled, he is regarded as an expert on electoral mechanisms. Chris Thornton, an American living in Belfast, is the security correspondent of the Belfast Telegraph. He has previous experience with both of Belfast's main morning newspapers, the News Letter and the Irish News.