Mick: The Real Michael Collins Hardcover - 2006

by Peter Hart

A major new biography of the most gifted, ruthless, and powerful leader in modern Irish history

Few people in history have been as mythologized as Michael Collins. Before his death at the age of thirtyone, Collins fought in the Easter Rising, organized the I.R.A., outspied British intelligence, negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and ran the first independent government of Ireland. To this day, millions revere him as the father of modern Ireland. Yet Collins was first and foremost a man who sought power and exercised it ruthlessly. More politician than soldier, he surrounded himself with followers loyal only to him. And his death left behind a troubled legacy: an I.R.A. he could not control, a Northern Ireland problem he did not solve, and a civil war he could not prevent.

In Mick, acclaimed historian Peter Hart explores Collins's life and asks what made him such an extraordinary and complex person. Drawing on previously unknown sources, Mick is the first biography to investigate Collins's life before he became a revolutionary and the first to take a critical look at his rise to power and its consequences. A fascinating portrayal of one of the most remarkable men of the twentieth century, Mick will be eagerly embraced by readers of Irish history and anyone interested in the lives of great leaders.