One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway -- And Its Aftermath

One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway -- And Its Aftermath - Paperback

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One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway -- And Its Aftermath
  • One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway -- And Its Aftermath
One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway -- And Its Aftermath - Paperback

One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway -- And Its Aftermath - Paperback

by Åsne Seierstad
$36.99
$36.99

Book Overview

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 Greengrass

Widely 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 Ut ya, 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 Ut ya 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.
ISBN9780374536091
Author Åsne Seierstad
PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
GenreNews & politics and History
FormatPaperback
PublishedApril 2016
LanguageENG- English
Pages560
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

History Nonfiction Political Science True Crime

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More by Åsne Seierstad

One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway -- And Its Aftermath

One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway -- And Its Aftermath - Paperback

One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway -- And Its Aftermath - Paperback

By Åsne Seierstad

About Åsne Seierstad

Åsne Seierstad has worked as a correspondent since 1993. She has written seven books and received numerous awards for her journalism. The Bookseller of Kabul was translated into over 40 languages. One of Us about Anders Breivik, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2015 by the New York Times and was awarded the 2018 Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. Her latest work, Two Sisters, was awarded the Brage Prize in Norway.

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