A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utoya

On 22 July 2011 a young man named Anders Behring Breivik carried out one of the most vicious terrorist acts in post-war Europe. In a carefully orchestrated sequence of actions he bombed government buildings in Oslo, resulting in eight deaths, then carried out a mass shooting at a camp of the Workers' Youth League of the Labour Party on the island of Ut ya, where he murdered sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers.

How could Anders Behring Breivik - a middle-class boy from the West End of Oslo - end up as one of the most violent terrorists in post-war Europe? Where did his hatred come from?

In A Norwegian Tragedy, Aage Borchgrevink attempts to provide an answer. Taking us with him to the multiethnic and class-divided city where Breivik grew up, he follows the perpetrator of the attacks into an unfamiliar online world of violent computer games and anti-Islamic hatred, and demonstrates the connection between Breivik's childhood and the darkest pages of his 1500-page manifesto.

This is the definitive story of 22 July 2011: a Norwegian tragedy.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 10/28/2013
ISBN: 9780745672205
Pages: 300
Weight: 1.29lbs
Size: 9.39h x 6.00w x 1.07d

Review Citations: New York Review of Books 03/05/2015 pg. 55