A harrowing and thorough account of the massacre that upended Norway, and the trial that helped put the country back together 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 Utoya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In "One of Us," the journalist Asne 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 Utoya 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."
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Anders Behring Breivik is a racist fascist terrorist that used bombs to blow up government buildings and pretended to be a security guard to gain access to Utoya island in Norway to masacre teenagers.
He hated the large population of muslims in Norway but then targeted unrelated victims that were teenagers on Utoya island. He wrote a racially opinionated manifesto that can be read online, if you wish to understand his mind and the way he thinks or sees the world.
I will add more to my review once i have read more of the book, but I have seen a documentary about the tragedy/murders.
While growing up Anders was displaying unusual behaviour that was unbearable for his mother Wenshe to deal with, due to not having a positive male role model in his life due to his parents divorce. Anders was very clingy, to the point that he was sleeping in the same bed as his mother and tried to force himself on his mother. He was abusive to his mother and sister and if he was told off he was would just smirk. He didn't make friends easily and would never cry like any normal child would if they hurt themself. His mother repeatedly tried to get him and his sister adopted by the social services, so he had a “weekend family” to look after him as well ashis mother.
He was very clingy and difficult child to care for, he was aggressive in terms of being clingy.
He was very resentful of a female prime minister in Norway at the time Gro Harlem, due to her opinion on free abortions or women being empowered and being treated equally.
