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A review by skwinslow
Columbine by Dave Cullen
4.0
This book kind of took over my life for a couple of days. Like so many people my age, I remember the Columbine shootings quite vividly; I was a sophomore in college, taking my first education classes, and obviously we had a lot of discussion surrounding this topic.
Reading this book twelve years after the fact was a really interesting experience. I filter everything through the lens of motherhood now, of course, and I find myself reacting very differently than I probably did as a twenty-year-old. I remember taping news clippings in my journal back in college, and I'm almost afraid to look at what I wrote -- was I as hasty as the general public to vilify the parents, for example? (Probably not, since my focus was more on what it must have been like as a teacher or a student at the school.)
Anyway. This book seems to be a pretty solid work of journalism, devoid of the media's sensationalistic reporting that shaped the public's perception of this tragedy even long after many of the rumors surrounding it had been debunked. In short: everything we think we know about Columbine is pretty much false, and in our collective desperation to find an immediate cause or someone to blame, we created a pretty powerful mythology.
Columbine is fascinating, horrifying, disturbing, unsettling -- everything one would expect. At the same time, it's highly readable, and even though I have a weaker stomach for such things these days, I couldn't put it down.
Reading this book twelve years after the fact was a really interesting experience. I filter everything through the lens of motherhood now, of course, and I find myself reacting very differently than I probably did as a twenty-year-old. I remember taping news clippings in my journal back in college, and I'm almost afraid to look at what I wrote -- was I as hasty as the general public to vilify the parents, for example? (Probably not, since my focus was more on what it must have been like as a teacher or a student at the school.)
Anyway. This book seems to be a pretty solid work of journalism, devoid of the media's sensationalistic reporting that shaped the public's perception of this tragedy even long after many of the rumors surrounding it had been debunked. In short: everything we think we know about Columbine is pretty much false, and in our collective desperation to find an immediate cause or someone to blame, we created a pretty powerful mythology.
Columbine is fascinating, horrifying, disturbing, unsettling -- everything one would expect. At the same time, it's highly readable, and even though I have a weaker stomach for such things these days, I couldn't put it down.