Riveting ... In forensic detail, Watkins recounts the efforts of a small group of Philadelphia-area men to create NORAID ... The Next One Is for You, will inevitably be compared with Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction blockbuster about the Troubles, Say Nothing, C.J. Chivers’s globe-spanning history of the AK-47, The Gun is another obvious antecedent...at first glance, this might seem like a story with a narrower scope and smaller cast of characters than those works. But its themes are arguably even more resonant in the current political moment ... The story of NORAID’s gunrunning operation drives home the degree to which there really is no such thing as a purely internal civil war ... The book also shows the power of America’s laissez faire gun market to drive armed conflict abroad.
Informative and well-researched ... Watkins does a thorough job ... At times, in her thorough account of the grass-roots support for the I.R.A., Watkins strays into the weeds.
