LAUSR

Readers unfamiliar with these events should preface their reading by reviewing this poem by Leonard Cohen: “All There is to Know about Adolph Eichmann.” The author seeks to provide us with all of the details of many victims of this wholesale slaughter of sixty-nine young people and staff at the youth camp on Utoya Island as well as those afflicted by the diversionary bomb blast in the government sector of Oslo. Thus the opening chapters, in their desire to create sympathy in the reader for those killed, wind up more readily revealing the banal uniformity of overly naive and idealistic socialist Norwegian youth, the self-focus of some parents who fail to comprehend what their children are enduring, and government officials who resented the security measures put in place in the aftermath to protect them. The opening chapters detail the Norwegian capacity for naiveté as well as their belief that the collective righteousness of their progressive policies will insulate them from such tragedies. However, once the author turns to a study of the perpetrator and his planning, the book becomes more informative. The account of his systematic pursuit of the island’s residents and their efforts to escape or hide is much more readable, if horrifying in its methodical pace. It is not often a reader is treated to such an account outside the world of fiction. Norway’s leadership is not alone in its naiveté about the capacity of a single assailant, well-prepared and equipped with conventional firearms, to wreak havoc. The final two chapters, “It’s Not Over” and the Epilogue provide details of the immediate aftermath as covered by Norwegian media as well as selected vignettes of survivors at the trial. During the trial, the issue quickly becomes not that of guilt or innocence, or even the sanity or insanity of the assailant. Rather the issue is this: “If he could laugh at the same things we could, could he not also cry at the same things? The most expedient thing to do was to dismiss him as a random outcast on the periphery of Norwegian society ... It was more uncomfortable to see him as sane, as someone from within, a man who could not only snicker at us, but also smile along with us (208). Hence my opening reference to the poem by Leonard Cohen. In the end, the book accomplishes its dual task: it removes the barrier between the reader and perpetrator, his victims, those who survived and those ancillary individuals whose policies laid the structures that led to the events and were shown to be wanting by a single determined aggressor. Written in a journalistic style rather than an academic style, it would be particularly useful to law enforcement profilers, students in any of the social sciences, as well as clergy and hospital chaplains.