Rather diffuse but thoroughly grounded in documented fact—as a result, it packs all the frightening power of a good horror...
A chilling descent into the mind of mass murderer Anders Breivik.
“It was only supposed to be an article for Newsweek,” writes veteran combat journalist Seierstad (The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War, 2008, etc.) of the origins of this long book—a touch too long, in need of some judicious streamlining. The long arm of editor Tina Brown drew Seierstad deep into a story that she’d watched unfold in her native Norway, a country about which she hadn’t written before. Her explorations of Breivik, who coldly gunned down 69 people at a youth summer camp after setting off a bomb in Oslo that killed another 8, have the unsettling quality that readers will associate with novelist Stieg Larsson, whose investigative reporting in next-door Sweden turned up a deep-running vein of fanatical right-wing hatreds and xenophobia. In Breivik’s case, the metamorphosis from gadabout to obsessive computer gamer and then unmoored killer has no sure inevitability. It could have turned out much differently, but it also might just have had to happen, as Seierstad’s portentous opening pages suggest. As neatly as possible, given the complexity of the story, the author unfolds the narrative of a Kurdish refugee family with Breivik’s developing anti-Muslim sentiments, seemingly connected with the publication of a fake manifesto promising a Scandinavian jihad. Fakery and invented scenarios form a theme, from forged diplomas to Breivik’s certainty that the Marxists were out to get him. What is certain, however, is that his killing spree, described in gruesome detail, was thoroughly and carefully planned from the beginning. On being told that he had disrupted the sense of security that blanketed the quiet nation, Breivik smiled and said, “That’s what they call terror, isn’t it?"
Rather diffuse but thoroughly grounded in documented fact—as a result, it packs all the frightening power of a good horror novel.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-27789-5
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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