Men That God Made Mad - Tapa dura

Derek Lundy, one of Canada's finest writers of non-fiction, was born in Belfast. In this remarkable book, he uses the lives of three of his ancestors as a prism through which to examine what memory and the selective plundering of history has made of the truth in Northern Ireland. In Ulster the name 'Lundy' is synonymous with 'traitor'. Robert Lundy, the author's first ancestral subject, was the Protestant governor of Londonderry in 1688, just before it came under siege by the Catholic Irish army of James II. For reasons that remain ambiguous, Robert Lundy ordered the city's capitulation. Crying 'No Surrender', hardline Protestants prevented it and drove him away in disgrace, a traitor to the cause. In Derek Lundy's view, however, Robert is more memorable for his peace-seeking moderation than for the treachery the standard history attributes to him. William Steel Dickson's legacy is a little different. A Presbyterian minister born in the mid-eighteenth century, he preached with famous eloquence in favour of using whatever means necessary to resist the tyranny of the English, including joining forces with the Catholics in armed rebellion. Finally there is 'Billy' Lundy, born in 1890, the antithesis of the ecumenical William, and the embodiment of what the Ulster Protestants had become by the beginning of World War I - a tribe united in their hostility to Catholics and to the concept of a united Ireland. The lives of Robert Lundy, William Steel Dickson and Billy Lundy encapsulate many themes in the Ulster past. In telling their stories, Derek Lundy lays bare the harsh and murderous mythologies of Northern Ireland and gives us a revision of its history that seems particularly relevant in today's world.

Derek Lundy is the author of Godforsaken Sea: Racing the World's Most Dangerous Waters and The Way of a Ship; a Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail. He lives on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.