Illustration of Kevin Galvin.David Wilson for The Boston Globe

Kevin Galvin remembers America’s bicentennial year, which he experienced in the Boston suburbs as a 10-year-old kid who “dressed as a Minuteman with a tricorn hat and a flintlock pistol for Halloween.” “I had a Cub Scout’s appreciation of what was good and true about the United States of America, exactly the feelings for the country that the Bicentennial events were designed to evoke,” he writes in his new book, “Troubled Times: The Boston Courthouse Bombing of 1976” (Brandeis University Press).

He was only dimly aware of the unrest gripping the country and Boston in particular — or of the powerful bomb planted by a radical leftist group that ripped through the Suffolk County Courthouse that spring, injuring more than 20 people. “I have only the vaguest recollection of my grandfather, who worked at the post office in West Roxbury, mentioning something about it,” Galvin says. The bombing, which took place on April 22, 1976, didn’t kill anyone but did grievously injure Ed Narine, who was at the courthouse to renew his license as a cab driver. An immigrant from Trinidad, Narine was a working-class man trying to further his education; he had been accepted to Northeastern after earning a degree from Roxbury Community College and was driving a cab to support himself while doing so. He was, Galvin points out, “the last person that your leftist radical revolutionary would want to hurt.”

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Book column: Galvin recounts Boston courthouse bombing of 1976