Overview

"Vast and revelatory, Dan Gretton's I You We Them is an unprecedented study of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity: the ""desk killers"" who ordered and directed some of the worst atrocities of the modern era. From Albert Speer's complicity in Nazi barbarism to Royal Dutch Shell's role in the murders of the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and the rest of the Ogoni Nine, Gretton probes the depths of the figure ""who, by giving orders, uses paper or a phone or a computer to kill, instead of a gun."" Over the past twenty years, Gretton has interviewed survivors and perpetrators, and pored over archives and thousands of pages of testimony. His insight into the psychology of the desk killer is contextualized by the journey he took to penetrate it. Woven into the narrative are his contemplative interludes--perspectives gleaned during walks in the woods, reminiscences about a lost love, and considerations of timeless moral conundrums. The result is a genre-bending work steeped as much in personal reflection as it is in literature and historical and psychological illumination. A synthesis of history, reportage, and memoir, I You We Them is the first volume of a groundbreaking journal of discovery that bears witness to and reckons with the largest and most pressing questions before humanity."

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9781094108018

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Reviews

The subject is tremendously important in a time grown ever darker--and ever more reminiscent of the darkest days in modern world history. -- Kirkus Reviews Remarkably powerful...[a] compelling and modern investigation of the collective amnesia which so often operates in the telling of national histories, including our own. -- The Spectator (London) Gretton raises profoundly unsettling questions about the capacity for doing evil that exists within all of us, and the ways in which the distancing effect of technology allows perpetrators to avoid thinking about the consequences of their actions. -- Irish Times Gretton offers a lucid, powerfully written indictment of historical outrages, posing painful moral questions that remain relevant today. -- Publishers Weekly A creative and personal exploration of what Gretton calls 'desk killers, ' the government and corporate bureaucrats whose decisions and actions are behind genocide and other mass atrocities. -- Library Journal A book of extraordinary importance and urgency--we need this book now. For its determined, passionate, and vulnerable seeking; for its insistence on what matters. Climate catastrophe tells us the reach of the desk killer has never been greater. We must take the hope and political will in this book as our own: forged in darkness and therefore inextinguishable. -- Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces

Author Information

Dan Gretton is a writer, an activist, and a teacher. He studied at the University of Cambridge, where he co-founded the pioneering political arts organization Platform. His work on human rights and peace issues ranges from the antinuclear movement of the 1980s to campaigning against contemporary human rights abuses, and he established the Body Politic program in art and activism at the University of London, Birkbeck. He has worked and shared platforms with Wole Soyinka, Angela Davis, Yinka Shonibare, Tony Benn and William Boyd, among many others. He lives in London. Peter Noble, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, grew up in South Africa and studied drama and music at the University of Cape Town. He has worked extensively as an actor, touring South Africa with a small repertory theater company, as well as working on radio, TV, and film.

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