In 1974, at the age of 20, Shane O'Doherty was sentenced to 30 life sentences at the Old Bailey. He was a terrorist who, single-handedly, had conducted a letter-bomb campaign on behalf of the IRA, during which two people had lost their hands and a further ten were injured in other ways. Previously, O'Doherty had been the IRA's chief bomb-maker. After 15 months in prison, and with the help of Quaker literature, he reached the conclusion that violence was utterly wrong. He declared his new-found pacifism in a letter to the Londonderry Press, and requested - and was allowed - to send apologies to his victims. He was eventually released from prison in 1989. In this book, O'Doherty provides an "anatomy" of an IRA terrorist and pleads for a cessation of the continuing atrocities.