num_pages: 530
description: A harrowing and thorough account of the massacre that upended Norway and the trial that helped put the country back togetherOn July 22 2011 Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utya where he killed sixty-nine more most of them teenage members of Norways governing Labour Party. In The Island the journalist sne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo become a terrorist? As in her bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul Seierstad excels at the vivid portraiture of lives under stress. She delves deep into Breiviks troubled childhood showing how a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist and Internet game addict and then an entrepreneur Freemason and self-styled master warrior who sought to save Norway from the threat of Islam and multiculturalism. She writes with equal intimacy about Breiviks victims tracing their political awakenings aspirations to improve their country and ill-fated journeys to the island. By the time Seierstad reaches Utya we know both the killer and those he will kill. We have also gotten to know an entire countryfamously peaceful and prosperous and utterly incapable of protecting its youth.
language: English
title: One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux