One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

Author: Seierstad, Åsne

Edition: First Edition

Number Of Pages: 544

Details:

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 and a New York Times bestseller, and now the basis for the Netflix film 22 July, from acclaimed filmmaker Paul GreengrassWidely acclaimed as a masterpiece, Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us is essential reading for a time when mass killings are so grimly frequent.On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and its reverberations. How did Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become Europe's most reviled terrorist? How did he accomplish an astonishing one-man murder spree? And how did a famously peaceful and prosperous country cope with the slaughter of so many of its young?As in her international bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul, Seierstad excels at the vivid portraiture of lives under stress. She delves deep into Breivik's childhood, showing how a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist, a successful entrepreneur, and then an Internet game addict and self-styled master warrior who believed he could save Europe from the threat of Islam and multiculturalism. She writes with equal intimacy about Breivik's victims, tracing their political awakenings, teenage flirtations and hopes, and ill-fated journeys to the island. By the time Seierstad reaches Utøya and relates what happened there, we know both the killer and those he will kill. In the book's final act, Seierstad describes Breivik's tumultuous public trial. As Breivik took the stand and articulated his ideas, an entire country debated whether he should be deemed insane, and asked why a devastating sequence of police errors allowed one man to do so much harm.One of Us is at once a psychological study of violent extremism, a dramatic true crime procedural, and a compassionate inquiry into how a privileged society copes with homegrown evil. Lauded in Scandinavia for its literary merit and moral poise, One of Us is the true story of one of our age's most tragic events.

Reviews:

Named among the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Publishers Weekly, and Men’s JournalFinalist for the New York Public Library's 2016 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism“One of Us has the feel of a nonfiction novel. Like Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, it has an omniscient narrator who tells the story of brutal murders and, by implication, sheds light on the society partly responsible for them. Although those two books are beautifully written, I found One of Us to be more powerful and compelling . . . ” ―Eric Schlosser, The New York Times Book Review“The roughly 70 pages Ms. Seierstad devotes to [the attacks] are harrowing in their forensic exactitude . . . These scenes are balanced by moments of tremendous heroism, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't read the final half of One of Us with perpetually moist cheeks . . . The nonfiction horror story told in One of Us moves slowly, inexorably and with tremendous authority.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times“Engrossing, important . . . There are many, many indelible images in Seierstad's account . . . As hard as it is to read about the attack, as frustrating as it is to learn how many delaying mistakes the first responders made and as monstrous as Breivik is, [his victims] on that island that day were beautiful in their idealism. They deserve to be witnessed, which is the ultimate reason to read One of Us.” ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s

“Fresh Air”“One of Us is a masterpiece of journalism, a deeply painful chronicle of an inexplicable and horrifying attack

UPC: 884187105648...

EAN: 9780374277895

Release Date: 21-04-2015

Languages: English

Item Condition: New

Binding: Hardcover