Play Audiobook Sample
I You We Them: Walking into the World of the Desk Killer Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(0.00) - 0 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
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.
Download and start listening now!
“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
Quotes
-
“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 -
“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
I You We Them Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About Dan Gretton
Dan Gretton is a writer, activist and teacher. In 1983 he cofounded the pioneering political arts organization Platform, in Cambridge, where he studied English literature. As well as working with Platform over many years on the human rights and environmental impacts of corporations, he has also developed radical initiatives in adult education and has lectured internationally on the subject of the “desk killer.” He currently divides his time between Northwest Wales and East London, where he shares his garden with a family of foxes.
About Peter Noble
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.