Name: One of Us
ISBN: 9780374277895

Asne Seierstad

An account of the 2011 massacre in Norway delves into the killer's troubled childhood to trace his descent from a privileged and gifted youth to a terrorist, offering insights into his radical beliefs against a backdrop of the country's famously peaceful politics.

The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

One of Us

Melanie Richards

Really well-written account of horrible subject matter. This review pretty much captures it: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Andrew Marti

The best book I've read this year, and one that will stay with me for years to come. This is the story of Anders Breivik, the orchestrator of the 2011 Norwegian terrorist attacks. Asne Seirstad pieces together the tragic details of that July 22nd afternoon, as well as Breivik's life before, and the trial afterwards. 

Her detailed account of the event themselves are haunting. I read late into the night, unable to put the book down, then unable to sleep after reading it. 

Whether Breivik was sane or not is debatable, and the author doesn't speculate. What is apparent is that Breivik's actions were dark, despicable, and as close to pure evil as I could imagine. Seirstad goes to lengths to highlight the details and stories of those impacted. You feel the impact of their loss, certainly on their families, but on the nation which has lost many who would have positively impacted Norway's future. 

You can't help but draw parallels to American culture. The demonization of Islam. The loneliness and isolation of so many young people. The hours spent in video game worlds, which idealize violence and guns. 

I'm generally an optimistic person. However, after reading this book, I worry that we will find more Anders Breiviks among us in the future.

INSPIRATION FOR THE NETFLIX FILM 22 JULY - DIRECTED BY PAUL GREENGRASS On 22 July 2011 Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 of his fellow Norwegians in a terrorist atrocity that shocked the world. One of Us is the definitive account of the massacres and the subsequent trial. But more than that, it is the compelling story of Anders Breivik and a select group of his victims. As we follow the path to their inevitable collision, it becomes clear just what was lost in that one day. SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA NON-FICTION DAGGER 2015 A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Inspiration for the Netflix film 22 July

G. Jason Head

Didn't care too much for this book. Hard to read - possibly because of the translation? 

The chapter about what happened on Utøya is a particularly dark and depressing.

Anders Breivik will ultimately be remembered not as a revolutionary, as he hopes, but as a lunatic murderer who deserves to spend the rest of his life in obscurity, rotting away in prison.

Jackson Weaver

iamazoo

Kemie G

John Holton

Garrett Jansen

Michael W

Åsne Seierstad

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 and a NYT 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 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.

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

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