One of Us - Asne Seierstad.epub

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.

PRAISE
"A chilling descent into the mind of mass murderer Anders Breivik . . . [Seierstad's] explorations of Breivik . . . have the unsettling quality that readers will associate with novelist Stieg Larsson . . . [One of Us] packs all the frightening power of a good horror novel. - Kirkus Reviews

A vivid, thoroughly researched, and suspenseful account of the 2011 massacre that killed 77 people in her native Norway . . . The book features evocative portraits of some of the victims and brims with vivid descriptions of the villages, city squares, buildings, and fjords of Norway, touching on the country's politics, changing demographics, and cultural shifts. With a reporter's passion for details and a novelist's sense of story, Seierstad's book is at once an unforgettable account of a national tragedy and a lively portrait of contemporary Norway.
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Asne Seierstad's One of Us is almost unbearable to read and absolutely impossible to turn away from: its account of an unthinkable tragedy is reported with staggering rigor and recounted with grace. It's hard to leave this book without feeling incredible grief, without feeling shaken to the core, without feeling urged toward essential questions about what we call evil and how it comes to pass.
- Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

An exhaustive account . . . This book throws a great deal of light on the life and times of a miserable killer. - The Guardian

This is journalism at its very best . . . Undoubtedly Seierstad's most powerful narrative to date. - The Sunday Times

An astonishing piece of work . . . One of Us looks straight at horror and doesn't flinch: it is classic reporting . . . We need to take note. - London Evening Standard

Scrupulously researched . . . [Seierstad] has a remarkable eye for the haunting detail, particularly of empathy, and of grief. - Daily Mail

Powerful . . . It's hard to see how, as a definitive account of what happened that awful July day, it could ever be bettered. - Irish Independent

[A] masterful and forensically detailed account of what may be the first cultural-ideological spree killing in history. - The Telegraph

A stunningly good piece of journalism . . .a rich and timely study. - Sydney Morning Herald