An Evening with Ali Watkins and Bradford Pearson: The Next One Is For You

Name: An Evening with Ali Watkins and Bradford Pearson: The Next One Is For You
Start: 2025-03-11T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Midtown Scholar Bookstore

Schedule

Tue, 11 Mar, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Midtown Scholar Bookstore | Harrisburg, PA

The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is honored to welcome New York Times reporter and Pulitzer finalist Ali Watkins for a conversation and signing on her new book, The Next One Is For You: A True Story of Guns, Country, and the IRA's Secret American Army. Watkins will be in conversation with bestselling author Bradford Pearson. This event is free and open to the public. Book signing to follow discussion.
To enter the signing line, books must be purchased from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event, or you may preorder a copy of the book for pickup/shipment.
About the Book:
From New York Times reporter and Pulitzer finalist Ali Watkins, the long-buried story of how a group of Philadelphia gunrunners armed the IRA at the height of the Troubles—a true-crime saga that illuminates Irish America’s central role in the conflict and its legacy.
Northern Ireland, 1975. Violence has erupted on the streets of Belfast. After years as a sleepy, guerilla army, the IRA is clashing with Loyalist gangs and heavily armed British soldiers. But the Troubles have spilled beyond the small island: An ocean away, in the heart of Philadelphia’s Irish enclave, a teenage girl finds a letter in her mailbox. Inside is a bullet, and the message is clear: The next one is for you or your family.
As celebrated New York Times reporter Ali Watkins reveals in this exquisitely reported nonfiction thriller, the conflict in Northern Ireland might have gone very differently had it not been for a small, ragtag band of carpenters, family men, and fugitives in the United States. The Philadelphia Five, as they came to be known, supplied the Irish Republican Army at its moment of greatest need, bolstering the fight for a united Ireland but fueling the Troubles at an untold cost. This small group of Irish nationalists smuggled hundreds of rifles, rocket launchers, explosives, and armor-piercing bullets across the Atlantic Ocean and into Northern Ireland. Whether they were skimming money from innocuous-seeming charities, coolly slipping weapons into hidden compartments of vans and houses, or scouring local graveyards for the names of dead Irishmen to use on federal firearm forms, the gunrunners approached their mission—to unite Ireland under one flag, by any means necessary—with ruthless poise, even as European and American investigators closed in, members of their own movement began to turn on them, and bodies stacked up on all sides.
A gripping tale of crime, rebellion, and the hazy line between them, The Next One Is for You is the definitive account of America’s hand in the Troubles—a conflict whose resonance is still felt today, in the United States and Ireland alike.
About the Authors:
Ali Watkins is a journalist for The New York Times, based out of the London bureau. Previously, she covered crime and law enforcement on the Metro desk and national security in Washington, also at The New York Times. She has also worked for BuzzFeed and at McClatchy Newspapers, where she was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for coverage of the Senate’s report on the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 torture program. Watkins is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, where she began her journalism career as an intern at the Philadelphia Daily News. She grew up in Fleetwood, PA and now lives between Northern Ireland and Galway.
Bradford Pearson is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist and author whose work examines everything from magicians to Japanese American incarceration to his own kidnapping. He’s written for The New York Times, and Esquire, Time, and Men’s Health magazines, among many other publications. He is currently the features editor for Philadelphia magazine and a contributing writer for the New York Times’ Special Projects team. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children.