Tag: True Crime Books

An investigative criminologist, Christopher Berry-Dee is a man who talks to serial killers. Their pursuit of horror and violence is described in their own words, transcribed from audio and videotape interviews conducted deep inside some of the toughest prisons in the world. Berry-Dee describes the circumstances of his meetings with some of the world’s most evil men and reproduces, verbatim, their very words as they describe their crimes and discuss their remorse — or lack of it. This work offers a penetrating insight into the workings of the criminal mind.

This book is said to be a book where the author is talking with serial killers but in my opinion this book isn’t about talking with serial killer as much as it was talking about the serial killers.

This book would be better if the author would have given us information about these serial killers or the crime scenes which we couldn’t find anywhere on the internet. But the author gives us the same fucking information which we can find on Wikipedia or somewhere else on the internet

This book is not as much about the interviews which the author has with the serial killers in this book than it is about the author telling us about them. The author could have at least given us some fragments of the interviews at least.

This book isn’t good nor bad, it is pretty much up to you to decide it. But the same information which the author is telling us in this book can be found on the internet for free and it will only take 3 seconds to find it.

There were chapters where the author basically went like “he / she did this, then that and she / he drove somewhere”. There were also moments where it seemed that the author tried to write fiction but without any success. Because every time it was feeling like this the chapter was going down hill.

There are some confusing involving this book. Because there is some small distinction between confessions, real facts, reliable, the logical and the pure form of speculation.

The writing style is pretty poor. There are couple of grammatical errors in the book and there are times where the author goes tells us over and over again something similar to “he / she did this, then that and she / he drove somewhere”.

I will say that you are not missing out on anything if you don’t read this book.

I give this book 2 /5

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of Norway’s governing Labour Party. In The Island, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist? 

This book is of course about 2011 Norway massacre. It was written by a journalist. And in the end it is an okay book.Of course it is a nonfiction book which gives us a step by step following on what happened in Oslo and at Utøya on July 22^nd, 2011.

In the end 65% of this book is about the life and childhood story of Anders Breivik. So if you are fine with reading 65% about the killer, 10% of what happened on the island and 25% about what happened after he was arrested then feel free to read it.

If you have followed the case from the beginning like I did, you will know that this book involves the unwholesome journey. It is an unwholesome journey because it doesn’t involve the whole story of the intersection of paranoid politics, social awkwardness, and something else, something darker which allows one person to murder another. This book is over 500 pages long, so it should involve a little more in it then it did.

But after all we get a lots of details which you might not know about Anders Breivik or the whole case. However as you can expect there are a lot of jumps in the timeline. This book begins with Anders Breivik being on the island of Utøya and shooting, but then in the next chapter in goes all the way back to when his mother was still a child. And again the next chapter is about the pregnant and giving birth to Anders. But it sort of gives us the vibe, because it males you imagine first moment of life of someone who would 30 years later kill over 80 people. I personally didn’t got yet across a book which does something similar.

This book doesn’t fail to show that not every monster throughout the history began with killing or harming animals. Anders Breivik didn’t harm animals but he was in constant trouble while he was growing up.

This book fails on explaining some questions and things which are in this book. Just as how can Anders Breivik managed to get weapons shipped to a country which claims “is one of the safest countries”. Well apparently it isn’t a safe country if you can ship weapons into it without having police at your door.

However there is two big issues with this book.

The first issue is that if you don’t know how the Norwegian system works and all that, you will have a lot of problems with understanding this book. Because this book was in my opinion written for people who lives in Norway or people who knows very well the Norwegian system.

The the second big issue is that author is telling us what people who are about to die thinks. It’s a nonfiction book so you can’t write it as a fiction. I don’t think that she is Professor X from X-men who can read minds and all that.

There are times when this book repeats itself couple of times, and it kind of gets boring if you read the same thing like 5 times in a row.  But of course I need to give this book points. for diving deep into the life, actions, and mind of Anders Breivik.

I give this book 3 / 5