taken from Goodreads:
It is driven by two questions: what drove these killers, and what did they do to this town?
*****
"On April 20, 1999, two boys left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. Their goal was simple: to blow up their school, Oklahoma City-style, and to leave 'a lasting impression on the world.' Their bombs failed, but the ensuing shooting defined a new era of school violence--irrevocably branding every subsequent shooting 'another Columbine.'
"When we think of Columbine, we think of the Trench Coat Mafia; we think of Cassie Bernall, the girl we thought professed her faith before she was shot; and we think of the boy pulling himself out of a school window--the whole world was watching him. Now, in a riveting piece of journalism nearly ten years in the making, comes the story none of us knew. In this revelatory book, Dave Cullen has delivered a profile of teenage killers that goes to the heart of psychopathology. He lays bare the callous brutality of mastermind Eric Harris and the quavering, suicidal Dylan Klebold, who went to the prom three days earlier and obsessed about love in his journal.
"The result is an astonishing account of two good students with lots of friends, who were secretly stockpiling a basement cache of weapons, recording their raging hatred, and manipulating every adult who got in their way. They left signs everywhere, described by Cullen with a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of police files, FBI psychologists, and the boys' tapes and diaries, he gives the best complete account of the Columbine tragedy.
"In the tradition of Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood, COLUMBINE is destined to be a classic. A close-up portrait of violence, a community rendered helpless, and police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers--an unforgettable cautionary tale for our time." (From inside cover)"
I'll never forget watching the events at Columbine unfold on national TV, nor will I forget how horrified I was to see it happen. Perhaps that's because I could recall all too clearly what it felt like to be glued to the TV in the student center at Paducah Community College, just 10 miles down the road as a similar scene played out in 1997 at Heath High School, while friends, classmates, family members and others wept and prayed. I was training to become a teacher at the time, and school shootings had taken up residence in the media spotlight, and they showed no signs of going away.
But for some reason, after the initial events at Columbine overloaded the media, I turned away from much of the coverage. It was TOO MUCH, if that makes sense, and I just couldn't read report after report after report. That's why much of the information in Cullen's book kept me so engaged, because it revealed just how much MISinformation the media released to the public. It wasn't just a little detail here or there, either. Some of these stories were just plain wrong, through and through.
This isn't an easy book to read on many levels: 1) it's hard to read the details of the shootings, the suffering that these students, parents, teachers, and administrators experienced and 2)it seems natural to want to find something or someone to blame when a tragedy of this magnitude occurs, but the book shows that there's not necessarily someone or something to blame here. Harris and Klebold come through as distinct personalities, developed from hours of video tapes and hundreds of journal pages -- and the matter-of-factness in their plan is just chilling. It's also frightening to realize just how much worse this entire event could have been, had their plan worked like it was supposed to.
Cullen's reporting is a fantastic example of great nonfiction writing; his style mixes powerful sentences and shows a knack for really getting inside a story and developing the multiple perspectives available. This book offers a page-turning look at this entire event, as well as 10 years of aftermath; I think it will come to be known as the definitive book on what happened that day.
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