The title of Gerry Adams's book may seem unduly optimistic to some or even many people; dawn, or even a gleam of light, seems as far from Northern Ireland just now as it did twenty years ago. He will be fifty years old next year - born in Belfast of parents who, on both sides, had a tradition both of republicanism and of working-class and trade-union activism. As a teenager he watched the apparent thaw in the 1960s between North and South, the visits between Lemass and Terence O'Neill which seemed to herald a new era of tolerance; but soon the counterblast of Paisleyism, and the Burntollet March, proved that this was largely an illusion. Drifting into republican activism, Adams was soon a marked man and served terms both on the Maidstone prison ship and in the notorious Long Kesh - of which he gives detailed and sometimes hair-raising accounts. The early days of internment, Bloody Sunday in Derry, the brutality of British soldiers in Ballymurphy where he lived, are all vividly described, but Adams often passes over IRA killings and counter-killings in a rather cursory way. He knew and liked the Irish Republic - where he has relatives - through many visits including youthful hikes with friends, but he is frequently critical of Southern politicians, though not as damning as he is of Willie Whitelaw and Margaret Thatcher. There is an affectionate portrait of Bobby Sands the hunger-striker, whom he knew well personally, and Adams claims that "The extraordinary sacrifices of the hunger strikers impressed themselves on nationalist consciousness in a way and to an extent which the establishments in both Britain and Ireland underestimated." His version of the IRA ceasefire and of the breakdown of peace talks seems inadequate and simplistic, and making John Major the scapegoat is a rather easy option, but the book ends on a note of affirmation: "Let us make hope and history rhyme."