and "At seventeen Bobby Sands was interested in music, girls, and soccer. Ten years later he led his fellow prisoners on a protest that grabbed the world's attention. Bobby Sands turned twenty-seven on a hunger strike, after spending almost nine years in prison because of his activities as a member of the Irish Republican Army. When he died on May 5, 1981, on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike against repressive conditions in Northern Ireland's H-Block prisons, parliaments across the world stopped for a minute's silence in his honor. Nelson Mandela followed his example and led a similar hunger strike in South Africa. and " Bobby Sands's remarkable life and death have made him the Irish Che Guevera. He is an enduring figure of resistance whose life has inspired millions around the world. But until the publication of Nothing but an Unfinished Song no book has adequately explored the motivation of the hunger strikers, nor recreated this period of history from within the prison cell. Denis O'Hearn's biography, which contains an enormous amount of new material based on primary research and interviews, illuminates for the first time this enigmatic, controversial, and heroic figure.