News Of Norway

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 and a New York Times bestseller, and now the basis for the Netflix film 22 July, from acclaimed filmmaker Paul Greengrass Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us is essential reading for a time when mass killings are so grimly frequent. 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 Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne 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 Utøya 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.

In the course of the nineteenth century the advent of printed pamphlets, with their news and advertisements, gave every town along Norway's long coast – populated by farmers, fishermen, clergy, businessmen and shopkeepers – a common language and a public arena for news and ideas. In Norway alone, the number of titles grew from a handful to a hundred in the course of the century. From 1900 to 1940 the number of papers swelled to two hundred and seventy – the number that remains today. The press system created a substantial structure, which would prove vital for many of the later media outlets that developed over the twentieth century with the breakthrough of new technologies - cinema industry, radio broadcasting, television and the internet. Newspapers generated the money and power for the development of these media, thus shaping such media and determining, or at least influencing, their perception and reception in Norwegian society. The press in Norway is therefore at the core of the modern media system and its rich history.