Book description
As an Irish Catholic raised in Leicester, fresh from University
College Dublin with a first in History, Kevin Myers is sent north to
work for the Belfast bureau of RTE News. There he covers the
increasingly vicious conflict erupting in the city as the IRA campaign
begins. Reporting too for Dublin's Hibernia, the London Observer and
NBC Radio for North America, Kevin Myers becomes the eyes and ears for
an uncomprehending world, chronicling the collapse of Northern Irish
society, from internment to the La Mon bombing. Raw, candid and
courageous, Watching the Door documents the deeds of loyalist gangs,
provos, paratroopers, politicians, British agents and an indomitable
citizenry, forming a remarkable double portrait of a divided society
and an emergent self -- a witness to humanity, and inhumanity, on both
sides of a sectarian faultline. In his wonderfully vivid, trenchant,
first-hand account of life on the streets of Belfast during the height
of the Troubles, a young Kevin Myers witnesses the blood fueds and
chaos of a people on the brink of civil war. His descriptions of
violence, counter-violence and emotional free-fall, combine humour
with reflection, eros with thanatos; they render history in the
making. By interweaving the political and the personal in a tale at
once self-deprecating, poignant and sexually buoyant, Watching the
Door is a coming-of-age story like no other. It is evocative and
passionate, and it records a pivotal time in Ireland's recent past,
blending articulacy with savage indignation in a classic of modern reportage.
Kevin Myers, writer, broadcaster and novelist (Banks of Green Willow,
2001), is author of the best-selling Kevin Myers (2001), a gathering of
his celebrated and provocative Irishman's Diary in The Irish Times, for
whom he wrote for over twenty-five years (another collection will appear
from The Lilliput Press in 2007). He is now a columnist with the Irish
Independent .
