One of Us

Mass killings are rare – especially in Norway, but we hear about them and they cause fear. Understanding why they happen has to be a way to try to stop them—even if it’s only stopping gun access (in the USA anyway) to those who are at risk. Seierstad takes a clear hard look at the tragedy where 77 people lost their lives—at the perpetrator’s childhood, where the system got it wrong and where the psychiatric profession couldn’t agree.

The prologue brought me to tears. In her brilliant book, reporter Åsne Seierstad chronicles the life and bloody attack of Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 Norwegians in 2011 when he set off a bomb outside the prime minister’s office in Oslo and then went to a youth camp on the idyllic island of Utøya, where he systematically slaughtered 69 people, mostly teenage members of Norway’s Labor Party. Seierstad writes like a novelist, but each detail comes from police records, interviews with victims, and other authoritative sources. Seierstad provides an intense, yet comprehensive, look at… show more.

2011 was the most violent year in Norway’s history. A bomb, detonated in central Oslo, killed eight people; a massacre on the island of Utøya a few hours later killed sixty-nine more. This book tells that day’s horrors by interweaving sociology, history, and psychology, looking at the weeks and months that surrounded the tragedy. One of Us was an inspiration behind the opening chapter of The Lion and the Nightingale where I tried to recreate the movements of the mass murderer during the Reina nightclub attack on January 1, 2017.