"Few people in history have been as mythologized as Michael Collins, and few have had as profound an impact on their country's history in so short a time as Collins had on twentieth-century Ireland. Before his death at the age of thirty-one, Collins fought in the Easter Rising, organized the I.R.A., and 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. Authoritative and absorbing, it offers a portrayal of one of the most remarkable leaders of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.