I You We Them, Dan Gretton
I You We Them, Dan Gretton
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I You We Them
Walking into the World of the Desk Killer

Author: Dan Gretton

Narrator: Peter Noble

Unabridged: 36 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/19/2020

Synopsis

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.

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Em on January 24, 2020

Well written with some truly haunting sections. I learnt a few things I'd never heard of before, such as Shell's role in human rights abuses. However, I think the message and content of the book were diminished by the style in which it was approached. Perhaps if I had known going in that this was mo......more

Goodreads review by TheBookWarren on April 24, 2020

It’s not often you find a true treasure by merely shelf perusing these days.. and yet, whisky at readings in Carlton 8-10wks back, I stumbled on this not-so-little non fiction title, that immediately struck me as “right up my very niche & utterly undefinable, alley”.. Turns out, my first instincts we......more

Goodreads review by Cecelia on September 08, 2020

This book is disturbing on every level. I was introduced to facts of the Holocaust, corporate collusion and historical genocides that I had not been aware of. Therein lies the value in this book. I found that when the author meandered off, to focus on his own life briefly, it wasn't a distraction as......more

Goodreads review by Christopher on January 07, 2021

I don’t usually write a lot of reviews on here, but I had a lot of thoughts about this work and figured I’d share some impressions. Like a few other readers, I was a bit thrown off by the way the book mixes in large sections of memoir and personal backstory into its professed aim: an exploration of......more

Goodreads review by Rhett on March 07, 2025

Brutal, persistent, exhausting and exacting. This is a stone cold sober tour of the unimaginable and the mundane, shot through with flashes of the writer’s own humanity that serve to reinforce the fact (which your mind *cannot* actually comprehend) that these four, five, six, seven digit numbers — 1......more

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

“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

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