The lightening-fast speed with which Northern Ireland spiraled into violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s is one of the more puzzling issues in recent Irish and British history. When Ireland's taoiseach, Sean Lemass, paid his historic visit to Northern Ireland's prime minister, Terence O'Neill, in January 1965, the political future of the long-disputed region seemed, if not exactly bright, at least relatively stable. But the emergence of a civil rights movement and the responses that it triggered in various quarters, ranging from defenders of the Stormont regime to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), altered the dynamic entirely. By the summer of 1970, street violence in Protestant and Catholic working-class neighborhoods raged out of control, the IRA had split (with the new Provisionals firmly committed to a renewal of republican armed struggle), British soldiers patrolled the streets of Belfast and Derry, and Northern Ireland was on its way toward what the authors of this work, Simon Prince and Geoffrey Warner, correctly regard as a full-blown civil war. Although a great deal has been written about various aspects of this civil war (euphemistically known as “the troubles”), with the exception of Bob Purdie's Politics in the Streets (Belfast, 1990), Niall Ó Dochartaigh's From Civil Rights to Armalites (Cork, 1997), and a small handful of other studies, surprisingly little scholarly research has been focused specifically on the turn to violence at the end of the 1960s, “the start of the troubles.”

By choice, however, the authors refrain from presenting a fully developed interpretation of this turn; their approach is best described as contextual and contingent. Writing more or less alternating chapters on Northern Ireland's two leading cities (Warner on Belfast, Prince on Derry), and drawing on impressively thorough research in a variety of sources, including newly available government papers along with police and intelligence reports, local newspapers, parish chronicles, and the memoirs of various participants (though not on oral history), they microscopically track events from local political disputes in Derry in the years preceding the city's first civil rights demonstration on 5 October 1968—“the day the troubles began,” in their account (85)—to the deadly rioting in Belfast on 27 and 28 June 1970. Along the way, they explicitly attribute responsibility for the rapidly accelerating violence to a variety of parties, including hardline unionist politicians; “reckless” rank-and-file officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, though not their commanders; traditionalist republicans in the IRA; and, more controversially, as in Prince's previous Northern Ireland's '68 (Dublin, 2007), the left wing of the civil rights movement itself.

The authors are most revealing in describing unionist official discussions, where Royal Ulster Constabulary senior officers emerge as considerably more flexible and intelligent than their political masters, and in analyzing the thinking of key figures within the IRA, where they are able to draw on a number of recent biographies and autobiographies of varying degrees of candor. Not all of their interpretations of events are as persuasive as others: their argument that the famous June 1970 gun battle at Belfast's St. Matthew's Catholic Church, for example, was less “a heroic defense of a threatened minority” than a carefully preplanned and “stage-managed” Provisional IRA effort to discredit the security forces and strengthen its own credibility, while certainly plausible, is far from conclusively substantiated (252). Loyalist paramilitary thinking and actions are analyzed with much less clarity throughout the book: the authors, for example, cannot ascertain whether the Ulster Volunteer Force, which would play such an important role in later events, was even present at some of these early ones, a point that underlines the potential benefits of oral history, for all the obvious difficulties that it would entail. More significant, the authors' decision to end their account in June 1970—“endings as well as beginnings lock in narrative meaning,” they readily admit (259–60)—precludes entirely a consideration of the role that British policy and troops might have played in the acceleration of violence. The Falls Road curfew in July 1970, which took place just a week after the events with which this book ends, the introduction of internment in 1971, and the killing of unarmed civil rights demonstrators by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday in 1972 are all familiar events and would seem highly pertinent to the kind of multifaceted and contingent analysis that the authors are seeking to pursue.

The work is somewhat frustrating in several other respects. Though Prince and Warner promise in their introduction a broadly international approach to their topic, in actual execution this turns out to be mainly a series of rather unsystematic comparisons to events in the history of the African American civil rights movement, particularly the 1963 Birmingham campaign, along with some references to the role that the contemporary Rhodesian crisis played in the thinking of British and unionist politicians. Similarly, though the first substantive chapter of the book opens with evocative material drawn from the work of the Derry feminist writer and activist Nell McCafferty, gender is never developed as a category of analysis in any systematic way, beyond the brief statement (offered twice, without elaboration) that “prevailing notions of manliness” determined certain behaviors on the part of working-class Catholic or Protestant men (148, 327). By way of contrast, a chapter on memory and the role that competing popular narratives of the civil rights movement had in shaping the early years of the troubles is systematically presented, theoretically sophisticated, and persuasive. In sum, then, this must be a mixed evaluation. Specialists will find much of value in this work, even if not agreeing with every one of its conclusions. Those looking for a more fully rounded and complete interpretation of Northern Ireland's descent into violence will likely be disappointed.