On The Brinks: Extended Edition: The Controversial Bestseller [Paperback]

Sam Millar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 2010

On The Brinks is an award-winning, bestselling book about growing up in war-torn Belfast and the biggest robbery in U.S.A. history. Highly controversial, is has been critically acclaimed by historians, Pulitzer Prize winners, and numerous newspaper and magazine critics.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...many twists and turns...perfect for a film..."
 
                                                                                                                        
 
--Irish Times

"Hollywood couldn't have done it better."

--Irish Voice, new York

"A remarkable life and an incredible survivor. On The Brinks is compulsive reading...powerful..."
 

 
--Irish Independent, Book Reviews

A remarkable life...reads like a movie script...an amazing story...riveting."
 
 
--Open House, RTE

 "Naked...for years on end in a freezing cell...beatings...whatever...Millar went through it all."
 
                
 
--Pulitzer Prize winning author, William Sherman, Esquire Magazine

"His brilliant memoir, On The Brinks, is a tale of surreal childhood in Belfast, of years of horror and torture and brutality in Long Kesh...The title of the book is testament to the author's blackest humour which courses through the dark red memories of prison torture..."

SOURCE2: Irish Emigrant, Book Review, March, 2003 --Irish Examiner, Jan, 2003

Review

"On the Brinks is compelling and powerfully written with a style that makes it hard to put down...it is Millar's ability to give a detached view of the brutalities and mistakes of his own life that makes On the Brinks read more like a work of fiction than the memoir it actually is."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 346 pages
• Publisher: Wynkin deWorde (November 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0954260775
• ISBN-13: 978-0954260774
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,322,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in Belfast, Ireland. Best-selling writer of crime books including the critically acclaimed Karl Kane novels. Numerous literary awards including the prestigious Aisling Award for Art and Culture, The Martin Healy Short Story Award, The Brian Moore Award for Short Stories and The Cork Literary Review Writer's Award. Spent most of my young life in Long Kesh prison for my political beliefs and spent other time (too long) in American penitentiaries before President Bill Clinton mercifully pardoned me and sent my sorry you-know-what back to Ireland. Read all about it in my critically acclaimed best-selling and award-winning memoir, On The Brinks. Rights acquired by Warner Brothers
Crime books include: Dark Souls, The Redemption Factory (short-listed for the Grand Prix De Littérature Policière, France's most prestigious crime writers' award). The Darkness of Bones, and the critically acclaimed Karl Kane series, Bloodstorm, and its follow-up, The Dark Place.

Find me lazing about on my website at www.millarcrime.com I'm always glad to have visitors, or simply send me your comments - good or bad. I'm a big boy. I can take it! The darkness is my light...
Please direct all inquiries regarding ON THE BRINKS or any other of my books to:
WHITT BRANTLEY MANAGEMENT AND TALENT (USA)
Literary, Film and Television
Voice: 484.824.0372
www.whittbrantley.com
[e-mail]

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unbelievable!!!, July 3, 2010

By 

Susie "Susie" (Chicago Area) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: On The Brinks: Extended Edition: The Controversial Bestseller (Paperback)

Like all of Sam Millar's books, On the Brinks was impossible to put down.

Millar is brutally honest, he openly shares his experience as a political prisoner in Belfast. He was only seventeen years old when he was arrested and confined to Cell Block H for several years.

As impossible as it is for me to comprehend how cruel, heartless and psychotically violent Nazi's and other groups have treated people, and probably still do in some places, I'm shocked by what what the prison guards were encouraged to do and how much they enjoyed doing it. Tragically nobody fought for the men or if they did they were unsuccessful.

Being in on the planning of the Brinks robbery was very exciting. I only wish Millar could have pulled it off in Belfast.

I found Bloodstorm, A Dark Place, The Darkness of Bones, The Redemption Factory and On the Brinks all very compelling for many reasons.

On the Brinks is just about impossible to get, hopefully it'll be reprinted.

I highly recommend reading Sam Millar's books.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kafka's "Josef K." becomes Westlake's "Dortmunder", March 9, 2011

By 

R. E. Conary "Author of the Rachel Cord PI My... (North Carolina) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On The Brinks: Extended Edition (Paperback)

Sam Millar's memoir, ON THE BRINKS: Extended Edition, is partly a Kafkaesque descent into Dante's Hell and partly a Donald E. Westlake "John Dortmunder" caper with Damon Runyon characters added for seasoning.

At the height of Northern Ireland's "Troubles" in the 1970s, young men were being pulled from their beds and imprisoned without trial at Long Kesh, an ex-RAF base that would infamously become known as "the Maze."

Sam Millar was one of those men and spent eight long year's "on the blanket" (naked with only a blanket for covering for refusing to work or wear prison garb) before being released. The first part of ON THE BRINKS details his harrowing experience.

It was a daily case of "today I'll break you", "today I'll endure" until the days became weeks, months, years of childish "you'll do what I say" and "no, I won't" brought to an extreme where no one could remember how it started or why.

It's the blackest of comedy where one prisoner can't swallow he's so filled with fear and anxiety of the torture to come, when he's suddenly brought to laughter by his neighbor Sammy screaming out to him, "Massey! Massey!...If you find an ear up there, will you bring it back -- it's mine!" Laughter that helps him survive another day.

Millar's raw, uncensored descriptions of the travesties, depravities, humiliations and tortures that he and his fellow prisoners lived mixed with the attitudes of the times are hard to imagine. To get even a brief visual taste, one might Google the Abu Ghraib prison photos for comparison and then wonder if had digital cameras and the Internet existed back then, would the inhumanities of Long Kesh have gone on as long as they did? I would like to think they would not, but it takes books like this to expose inequities even in so-called "civilized" societies.

Turning from black humor to high romp, Millar changes gear in Part Two, as Sam in America plans and executes one of the largest heists in U.S. history: the Jan. 5, 1993, $7.4 million robbery of the Brinks Armored Car depot in Rochester NY. It plays out like a classic Westlake "Dortmunder" caper: the perfect plan, perfect execution, but losing the money in the end.

But perfect rarely happens in fiction or the real world. Mistakes are made: overloading the getaway van with so much loot it can't move and having to leave $3 million behind; hanging onto the van as a personal vehicle; over stressing to the point of not realizing he's under surveillance ("We always used to see a lot of cops on the corner with binoculars...Everybody in the neighborhood saw the police...(Millar) never seemed to notice.").

After his arrest is a LOL "good cop-bad cop" interview where Sam is threatened to confess: "You know you'll not survive our prison system, don't you? It's not like those pussy British prisons that you came from." Yeah, right.

A mismanaged prosecution causes charges to be dropped and Millar and a priest are convicted only of possession of stolen money; two innocent defendants are freed; and Millar begins a 60-month sentence wondering each day if new charges would be filed before the statute of limitations runs out. Twenty months later Millar reads in a newspaper that, "A Belfast man, Samuel Millar, is to be the first person transferred from an American prison to serve the rest of his time in prison in the North of Ireland." He also receives a phone call informing him that President Bill Clinton was sending him home. He'll only believe it once he's on the plane and crossing the Atlantic.

More than $5 million from the robbery is still missing.

Millar has said, "This is my story: the good, the bad, the ugly. It may not be to everyone's taste." Kafka and Westlake could not have done it better. Great reading. Don't miss it!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, December 21, 2009

By 

Noir Fan (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On The Brinks: Extended Edition: The Controversial Bestseller (Paperback)

This is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. From the very first page to the last, you don't want it to end. From Millar's time in prisons all around the world, to becoming a best-selling and award-winning crime writer, this one has it all. Brilliant. Unforgettable. Unputdownable. It's that good.