 LEX Copyright Iroda |
|||
| E-mail: lexcopy@lexcopyright.hu – írjon nekünk! | |||
| Céginformáció | Újdonságok | Szerzőink | |
| Képviseleti lista | In English | ||
SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING: A Memoir of Murder
“It is a cliché to compare such writers to George Orwell or, more lately, with justice, Martha Gellhorn. But, if the shoe fits . . . Recently, a Filipina reporter named Patricia Evangelista came by the office, for an interview…. Our topic was her new book, “Some People Need Killing,” about the reign of Rodrigo Duterte. It is hardly written with Orwellian cool, but it stands next to “Homage to Catalonia.” Evangelista’s title comes from a vigilante, whose offhand comment to her exemplified the bloodiness of the Duterte Presidency and its extralegal drug wars. Evangelista covered the killings, which left thousands dead, for the independent news platform Rappler. Now, in “Some People Need Killing,” she has written a journalistic masterpiece.
She is a very rare talent….” – The New Yorker, Q&A with David Remnick: Q&A with David Remnick
Patricia Evangelista is a thirty-eight-year-old writer and journalist in Manila. She was born in 1985, five months before the dictator Ferdinand Marcos fell. During the recent reign of terror of President Rodrigo Duterte, Evangelista has worked a distinctive and lonely beat that was perhaps at once the worst and most vital job in all of journalism—to chronicle the tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings ordered by Duterte in the name of fighting a drug war to capture the atmosphere of fear that comes when an elected president claims powers well beyond those granted to him and to record the real-time collapse of the democracy in her country. In December 2021, as her publisher Maria Ressa accepted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to The Rappler, the online newspaper they both worked for, Evangelista was in Oslo as well, and was asked to speak by the Nobel organization. Here is that speech and we recommend that you watch -- it says so much about who Patricia Evangelista is: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=596310491636313
In SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING, Evangelista’s towering and monumental book on the life and death of Philippine democracy, the Rappler’s “trauma reporter” (as she describes herself) writes a book for the ages. In the tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski, Joan Didion, and Philip Gourevitch, Evangelista recounts a life and career of braving all consequences to bear witness in her country and -- in this era of global autocratic resurgence -- reveal essential truths about power, and of how people can willingly surrender their sovereignty to a strongman who runs for office on a platform of taking away their rights. As the greatest journalists have always done, Evangelista immerses herself in this dark world of killers, and their victims: A vigilante named Simon who she met in a hotel room, reflected what seems to be the psychological accommodation that most of the country had made and gave her the title for this book – “I’m really not a bad guy,” he said. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.”
But Evangelista does something else, too. With a scope that is magisterial, and in a voice that is deeply personal, she tells the full benighted story of how it all came to this. The social history of a failed democracy that is only as old as she is and of her own family’s complicity in the Marcos dictatorship that only now seems a clear harbinger of the tragic present. Evangelista has written a book that is both definitive of this moment and a demonstration to all democracies on earth, that a deadlocked and corrupt politics, riven by untended ethnic, racial and class strife, will gave way to something even worse. And it must be said: Writing like this has seldom been so beautiful and a book that is so needed to read now with the current world events – this is literary journalism and personal history with investigative reportage, at its best.
Read this Praise that SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING has received:
“In this shattering debut, Filipina journalist Evangelista interviews detainees, families, and key government officials to illuminate the Philippines’ brutal war on drugs… With rigorous reporting, Evangelista painstakingly lays out how Duterte gathered political power and convinced his constituents to support the slaughter. Most chillingly, she speaks to several ardent Duterte followers and allies who’ve come to regret their support for the ex-president, who left office in 2022. The result is an astonishing and frightening exposé that won’t soon be forgotten.” --★ Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“Analytical, ambitious, and told with empathy, this will stand as a definitive historical account of the Philippines’ drug war.” – ★ Booklist (starred review)
“Heartbreaking personal stories underscore the consequences of a government-incited extrajudicial rampage.” - Kirkus Review
“Patricia Evangelista exposes the evil in her country with perfect clarity fueled by profound rage, her voice at one utterly beautiful and terrifyingly vulnerable. In short, clear sentences packed with faithfully recorded details, she reveals the nature of unbridled cruelty with a relentless insightfulness that I have not encountered since the work of Hannah Arendt. This is an account of a dark chapter in the Philippines, an examination of how murder was conflated with salvation in a violent society. Ultimately, however, it transcends its ostensible subject and becomes a meditation on the disabling pathos of self-delusion, a study of manipulation and corruption as they occur in conflict after conflict across the world. Few of history’s grimmest chapters have had the fortune to be narrated by such a withering, ironic, witty, devastatingly brilliant observer. You Mary think you are inured to shock, but this book is an exploding bomb that will damage you anew, making you wiser as it does so.” – Andrew Solomon
"In this haunting work of memoir and reportage, Patricia Evangelista both describes the origins of autocratic rule in the Philippines, and explains its universal significance. The cynicism of voters; the opportunism of Filipino politicians; the appeal of brutality and violence to both groups; all of this will be familiar to readers, wherever they are from." --Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
“The story of what has happened in the Philippines is the story of what is happening in the wider world, as people turn to autocracy lured by the false promise of security and belonging. Some People Need Killing is a beautiful, gripping and essential book that paints a picture of how autocracy takes root. Through dogged reporting, extraordinary courage and exquisite storytelling, Patricia Evangelista has written one of those books that is both definitive on its subject while transcending it. Read this book to understand the times we are living in, and to be inspired by Evangelista’s relentless insistence on uncovering the truth and revealing our common humanity.” --Ben Rhodes, author AFTER THE FALL
“Tragic, elegant, vital. She risked her life to tell this story.” --Tara Westover, New York Times bestselling author of Educated
| 1054 Budapest, Szemere u. 21. Tel: (06-1) 332-9340 Fax: (06-1) 331-6181 | |||
| Info | |||