Columbine book

I arrived at Columbine the first hour of the shooting, and spent ten years on this book.

Jump to ratings and reviews. Want to read. Rate this book. Dave Cullen. As we reel from the latest horror. In the wake of Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this plague grows more urgent every year.

Columbine book

Chapters alternate between the two stories. Cullen says he spent ten years researching and writing the book. He is best known for his work for Slate and Salon. His Slate story "The Depressive and the Psychopath" five years earlier, offered the first diagnosis of the killers by the team of psychologists and psychiatrists brought into the case by the FBI. The book spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list in the spring of , peaking at 3. The book gained considerable media attention for addressing many of the so-called Columbine myths widely taken for granted. According to the book, the massacre had nothing to do with school bullying , jocks , the Gothic subculture , Marilyn Manson or the Trench Coat Mafia. Cullen's Salon coverage had already refuted some of the worst misconceptions about the story by the fall of Emerging details mostly corroborate what was already known. Columbine has two main storylines, told in alternating chapters: the 'before' story of the killers' evolution toward murder, and the 'after' story of the survivors. There are shorter 'during' accounts, describing the attack itself, dispersed throughout the book. Formally composed of 53 chapters divided into five parts, the book also includes a timeline, 26 pages of detailed endnotes, and a fifteen-page bibliography organized into topics.

That's seven Virginia Techs in a week.

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Decorated investigative journalist Dave Cullen researched the Columbine shooting for ten years in order to compose a highly-detailed, exquisitely-researched tome which toggles back and forth between the years leading up to the shooting and the months that followed it. Eric Harris was a charming, egomaniacal psychopath who longed for the annihilation of the human race, and Dylan Klebold was a lost depressive subject prone to outbursts of anger. When they became bored with their spree, they attempted once more to detonate their two large propane bombs in the cafeteria, then returned to the library and committed suicide side-by-side. In the aftermath of the attack, the Columbine High community—which dominated the population of the tight-knit, borderline-rural Jefferson County, just ten miles from Denver—grieved and struggled to understand the reason for the attack. Cullen focuses on the survivors of the attack and the families of the deceased as a way of magnifying the unique trauma of the event. Cullen tackles big issues such as the debate over how to handle mental health treatment in the case of potentially dangerous psychopaths, how shared grief and post-traumatic stress can both divide and solidify a community, and how the mythologizing and sensationalizing of national crises makes each attack to hit America—or any country in the world—more and more difficult to process, understand, overcome, and prevent from occurring again.

Columbine book

I arrived at Columbine the first hour of the shooting, and spent ten years on this book. I was driven by two questions: why did they do it, and how did this shattered community recovery? My surprise was that most of what we "know" about Columbine was wrong. It wasn't about jocks, Goths or the Trench Coat Mafia. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold didn't even envision a school shooting.

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Riveting and disturbing. Oakland East Bay Express. It never happened. Yes, a biographical piece of time, not a life or a school or even the killers. A very captivating book. Cullen has pulled together all available info, and tells the story of the two boys who perpetrated this crime, how they came to their decision to act, how they went about gathering their deadly materials, how they planned their actions, and how they leaked enough information about their plans that anyone paying attention should have seen what was coming. For me, these two particular story lines took this book to another level for me. And in their minds, that was : Cool. Author 8 books 63 followers. It is a compelling story Cullen tells, moving, sad, hopeful and unfortunately, all too real. He shared the difficulties and problems that the two families of the murders faced and still faced. That they were waging a private war against a target maybe jocks, maybe Christians, maybe the whole school. They were about to begin what would be known as the deadliest schooting in an American high school, killing one teacher and twelve students.

Chapters alternate between the two stories. Cullen says he spent ten years researching and writing the book.

Dave Cullen - image from FocusFeatures. Compared to humans, he was like God. On 20th April they sauntered into the school cafeteria and dumped down the big backpacks containing the bombs with timers ticking. Cullen says Eric "had no interest in the Marines", but Eric's journal tells another story: "I would have been a great Marine, it would have given me a chance to be good". Scenes from the massacre are graphically depicted in the early chapters, and later through flashbacks. Cullen gives these boys a personality as he searches for the triggers that led them to act. I ask you, is that not the motis operandi of many of the religious zealots we hear about on the news? Neither of the two shooters were subjected to bullying or abuse as their journals discovered after the shooting make clear. Highly recommend this book. Makes sense…. We get to know these boys fast. Detailed, Exhaustive, Published by RAngeline , 1 year ago.