Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines

(Hardback, Main)

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'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 democracy for the Philippines. Three decades later, a nation that once taught the world the meaning of nonviolent resistance discovers the fragility of its democratic principles under the regime of populist autocrat Rodrigo Duterte.

Some People Need Killing is Evangelista's meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines' ongoing drug war and Duterte's assault on the country's fledgling democracy. Over the past five years, Evangelista has had the distinctive beat of chronicling the extrajudicial killings ordered by Duterte and carried out by police and gangs of government vigilantes, counting the body bags and speaking to the killers and survivors, and capturing the atmosphere of fear that comes when an elected president claims powers well beyond those granted to him. The book gets its title from a vigilante named Simon, who seemed to reflect the psychological accommodation that most of the country had made when he told Evangelista this: 'I'm really not a bad guy,' he said. 'I'm not all bad. Some people need killing.'

A journalistic tour de force, Some People Need Killing is a powerful contribution to the journalism of witness, and an investigation into the universal impulse toward domination and resistance, as told through a drug war that has led to the slaughter of thousands.

Reviews

Tragic, elegant, vital . . . Evangelista risked her life to tell this story -- Tara Westover, #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of EDUCATED
In this blindingly ambitious, unfathomably brave, fiercely reported book, Patricia Evangelista exposes the evil in her country with perfect clarity fueled by profound rage, her narrative voice at once utterly brutal and terrifyingly vulnerable. In short, clear sentences packed with faithfully recorded details, she reveals the nature of unbridled cruelty with an insightfulness that I have not encountered since the work of Hannah Arendt...Few of history's grimmest chapters have had the fortune to be narrated by such a withering, ironic, witty, devastatingly brilliant observer. You may 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, National Book Awardwinning author of FAR FROM THE TREE
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 Prizewinning author of TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY

Author Bio

Patricia Evangelista is a Manila-based trauma journalist and ASU Future Security Fellow covering disaster, conflict and human rights issues. She was a fellow at the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and the Logan Nonfiction Fellowship. Her reporting on armed conflict and the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan was awarded the Kate Webb Prize for exceptional journalism in dangerous conditions. She lives in Manila.