Between 1920 and 1922 political violence in Belfast assumed an intensity unprecedented in the city's nineteenth-century history and rarely equaled even in the more recent Troubles of 1969–98. Though ultimately responding to growing political violence elsewhere in Ireland, the immediate trigger was a provocative speech by Unionist leader Edward Carson at the 12 July 1920 Orange celebrations. This was followed by massive expulsions of Catholics and “rotten Prods” (usually Labour supporters) from workplaces, the looting and burning of Catholic-owned businesses (esp. liquor stores) by mobs, and the expulsion of Catholic families living in Protestant areas (and of some Protestants from Catholic areas).

Snipers fired into districts inhabited by the opposing faction, killing people standing at hall doors; Irish Republican Army (IRA) men threw hand grenades into trams containing Protestant shipyard workers, while loyalists threw hand grenades into groups of children playing in Catholic streets. Some policemen collaborated with loyalist gangs or carried out reprisal killings of Catholic civilians. The violence died down in the winter of 1920–21 but resumed in response to the Anglo-Irish truce of June 1921 and the subsequent sense of political instability; it tailed off only in the autumn of 1922, as a result of the outbreak of civil war in the new Irish Free State and the implementation of drastic security legislation.

Parkinson calculates that 498 people were killed and over two thousand seriously injured; ten thousand were expelled from their workplaces and twenty-three thousand driven from their homes. Damage to property is estimated at £3 million (by the values of the time). The memory of the violence lingered in both communities for decades afterward and helped to shape the mind-set of the Northern Ireland state. These events have attracted little attention by comparison with the later Troubles; though most works on the period make some reference to them, publications devoted to them are highly politicized and generally produced for small local readerships. Nationalist accounts emphasize Catholic victimhood and official collusion in loyalist violence; Unionist writers speak of the defense of the new Northern Ireland statelet against IRA aggression.

Parkinson attempts to provide the first full account of events in Belfast during the period. (Events elsewhere, though not ignored, are discussed only insofar as they related to the situation in the city.) The book draws on a variety of sources, including archival material and interviews with elderly people (whose childhood memories provide fascinating insights into the texture of everyday life during these horrors); however, it principally relies on a critical reading of newspaper accounts. Parkinson emphasizes the impact of the violence on ordinary people; at times the book becomes a litany of murders as it lists the names of victims and attempts to reinsert what little can be known about their lives and the circumstances of their deaths into the historical record.

Commentators with strong commitments to one side or the other may be offended by Parkinson's implicit view that questions of political right and wrong are less important than a shared experience of suffering. Although his account leaves little doubt that the minority Catholic community suffered disproportionately, that loyalists were responsible for the majority of the violence, and that the Northern Ireland authorities were seriously negligent in dealing with loyalist violence and police collusion, he rejects the theory of a “grand plan” orchestrated by the Unionist leadership and rejects the concept of an anti-Catholic pogrom on the grounds that this implies one-sided violence, while the IRA played a significant though subordinate role in the bloodbath. (Parkinson's account of the Belfast IRA is somewhat weaker than his treatment of loyalism and can be supplemented by reference to Robert Lynch's The Northern IRA and the Early Years of Partition [Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006].)

Though Parkinson tries to go beyond narrative, his attempts at analysis are scattered and ultimately overwhelmed by these chronicles of horror. The book would benefit greatly from an initial discussion of the socioeconomic structures of Belfast as well as the political background, though it does convey a vivid sense of the extent of urban poverty and overcrowding, the impact of being driven out of one's home or having a breadwinner incapacitated, and the crushing strain placed on extended families and other support networks. Given Parkinson's extensive reliance on newspaper sources, it would also have been advisable to provide some extended analysis of the ownership and political perspectives of different papers. It would also have benefited from a map of Belfast to give readers a clearer picture of the location of “shatter zones,” some graphs clarifying how violence was linked to time and place, and a fuller chronology setting out a detailed sequence of events (easily lost sight of amid the lists of murders).

Some blunders could have been corrected by tighter proofreading and editing. A reference to the Dublin headquarters of the Orange Order in Kildare Street (64) must reflect confusion with the Kildare Street Club or the Masonic Grand Lodge in Molesworth Street (off Kildare Street); the Orange headquarters was in Parnell Square, on the other side of the Liffey. The Unionist M.P. Thompson Donald is called “Donald Thompson” (71). C. T. P. Grierson, Church of Ireland Bishop of Down, is described as “Bishop C. T. P. Down” (209) in a misunderstanding of the Anglican Episcopal custom of signing public statements with initials and title of see.

Despite these shortcomings, Parkinson is to be commended for providing a pioneering account of events that are too often glided over by discussions of constitutional arrangements or quarried by point-scoring partisans; in so doing he provides an useful perspective on the long-term roots of the later Northern Ireland Troubles.