Hey, it's Empira's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. There's this new show on FX Hulu called Say Nothing.

It's an illuminating and complicated look at Northern Ireland during The Troubles that sells how seductive armed resistance can be, but also shows how empty it can be too.

The show is based on a nonfiction book written by the journalist Patrick Radin-Keefe,

and he was on NPR when it was first published in 2019.

It's worth listening to even if you haven't seen this show because he gets into this idea

of how hard it is to bury history and how violence can leave a really

lasting mark.

That's after the break.

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In his new book, journalist Patrick Radinkeef uses one crime to tell a much bigger story.

The book is Say Nothing, a true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland.

It's about the troubles, the decades of conflict when the Irish Republican Army and other Catholic paramilitary groups used bombings and kidnappings and murder to try to force the end of British rule in Northern Ireland.

Protestant paramilitary groups fought back.

At the point where my story begins in 1972, you have the beginning of what was really an all-out war.

You have British soldiers on the streets.

You have the police,

and then you have a whole series of paramilitary groups, planting bombs and shooting at each other

in the streets. This was the backdrop for the disappearance of Jean McConville. She was 38 years old,

...