A “journalistic masterpiece” (The New Yorker) about a nation
careening into violent autocracy—told through harrowing stories of
the Philippines’ state-sanctioned killings of its citizens—from a
reporter of international renown
“Tragic,
elegant, vital . . . Evangelista risked her life to tell this
story.”—Tara Westover, #1 New York Times bestselling author of
Educated
A New Yorker Best
Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“My job is to
go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors,
write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I
don’t wait very long.”
Journalist
Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street
revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three
decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation
discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the
regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.
Some
People Need Killing is
Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of
the Philippines’ drug war. For six years, Evangelista chronicled
the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of
Duterte’s war on drugs—a war that has led to the slaughter of
thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors
and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected
president decides that some lives are worth less than others.
The
book takes its title from a vigilante whose words seemed to reflect
the psychological accommodation that most of the country had made:
“I’m really not a bad guy,” he said. “I’m not all bad. Some
people need killing.”
A
profound act of witness and a tour de force of literary journalism,
Some People Need Killing
is also a brilliant dissection of the grammar of violence and an
important investigation of the human impulses to dominate and resist.
