Author of the week

Patricia Evangelista no longer believes, if she ever did, that journalism can save the world, said David Remnick in The New Yorker. Though her Some People Need Killing has been named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, Time, and The New York Times, the veteran reporter speaks of it as merely a record of what she witnessed while chronicling the wave of extrajudicial killings carried out in her native Philippines when then-President Rodrigo Duterte unleashed a war on drug users and dealers. For six years, Evangelista worked night shifts in Manila to race from killing to killing, logging the details to determine which were committed by the police, which by vigilantes or others. “Then you learn to stand still and listen for the screaming,” she says. “That’s how you find out who the family is.”

Evangelista was horrified by the way Duterte dehumanized his campaign’s targets, said Mallory Yu in NPR.org. She was equally disturbed that so many Filipinos accepted the violence, including the vigilante who gave her book its dark title. In response, she gathered and has shared the stories of many of the victims. “Consciously or unconsciously, across the book, I was trying to define the human being in whatever fashion other people see ordinary, regular, everyday people,” she says. “Here is the color of their shoe. Here is the tenor of their scream. Here is what he last said to his mother.” She doesn’t expect that her efforts will stir her countrymen to suddenly turn away from the despotism Duterte’s reign represented. Her goals are simpler. “I want to keep a good record. I want to honor the people who told me their stories,” she says. “They didn’t have to talk to me, and they did.”