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History & Society

Say Nothing

A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

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Say Nothing is a work of investigative narrative nonfiction about the Troubles and their long aftermath in Northern Ireland. Its central case is the December 1972 abduction and killing of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten taken from her Belfast home. McConville’s disappearance gives the book a human-scale route into a much larger history of republican militancy, British security policy, sectarian division, clandestine intelligence, imprisonment, political negotiation, and unresolved grief. Rather than attempting a complete chronological history of the conflict, Keefe follows intersecting lives. These include members of the McConville family; republican activists Dolours and Marian Price; senior IRA figure Brendan Hughes; and Gerry Adams, whose alleged relationship to the IRA is treated as a major question in the narrative. The book also examines the Boston College oral-history undertaking commonly known as the Belfast Project. Interviews recorded for that archive promised parti…

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History & Society

Evicted

Poverty and Profit in the American City

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Evicted examines how the loss of a home operates within the broader machinery of American poverty. Its principal setting is Milwaukee during and after the 2008 financial crisis, where Desmond follows eight low-income families—Black tenants on the city’s North Side and white tenants in a South Side mobile-home park—along with the landlords whose decisions shape their housing prospects. Rather than presenting poverty only through statistics or policy analysis, the book reconstructs daily life under severe rent burdens: searching for apartments, negotiating with landlords, appearing in housing court, losing possessions, moving between temporary homes, and trying to preserve work and family routines amid displacement. The narrative is based on embedded fieldwork supplemented by interviews, surveys, and analysis of eviction-court records. Desmond reports that he interviewed 250 tenants in eviction court, surveyed more than 1,000 Milwaukee renters, and analyzed hundreds of thousands of cour…

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History & Society

The Overstory

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The Overstory is a large-scale literary novel in which the lives of nine Americans become entangled with trees, forests, scientific discovery, and environmental resistance. Its opening movement presents several largely independent personal and family histories. Each history contains an encounter with a particular tree or species—a surviving American chestnut, a banyan, a mulberry, a maple, or the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest—that changes how a character understands time, survival, or human responsibility. These separate narratives eventually converge around forest defense and then branch apart again as the consequences of activism reshape the characters' lives. The novel is divided into four parts—“Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds”—so that its architecture follows an arboreal pattern. This is more than decorative organization. The early biographies establish the characters' origins; the central sections connect them through shared purposes and conflicts; and the conclu…

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