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.
First Line: "He told them he loved them."
Random Quote: "The Klebold house was orderly and intellectual. Sue Klebold was a stickler for cleanliness, but Dylan enjoyed getting dirty."
Review: This book is exhaustive and, frankly, exhausting. Mr. Cullen gives new meaning to the phrase "excruciating detail" and that is one thing this book provides - page after page of minute by minute reconstruction in excruciating detail of events surrounding the shootings at Columbine. Mr. Cullen was on the scene (with the rest of the media world) during the shooting and in its immediate aftermath and has spent the last decade interviewing countless people and viewing countless more primary sources in an attempt to understand what happened; that, at least, is what he claims. In reality the book is something less, I think. It's not so much about understanding what happened and more about documenting the details of what happened - it's decent reportage, but it's not terribly analytical and that makes it pretty flawed.
Harris & Kelbold on the school's security cameras - Image via WikipediaThis is not to say that I don't care what happened, I do, but I expected a much more analytical, much more interesting account than this one. Yes, the book exposes the mythologies behind what happened, but doesn't examine the more interesting to me questions of why those mythologies occurred. What was it about this event that so stirred the media and created so many unreliable narrators?
I'm also puzzled by the recent desire on the part of the media to minimize the impact of bullying. Were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold bullies? Yes. Were they also bullied? Yes to that, too. Harris may have been a sociopath and Klebold clinically depressed, but lots of people are those things and don't try to blow up their high schools and take down dozens of their classmates before shooting themselves in the head. What factors contributed to this decision, please?
There's been a recent series on Slate.com that explicates the notion that bullying just isn't that bad and that anyone who suffers ill effects from it is just a crazy person. This exploration of the events surrounding the suicide of a young high school student whose harassment was well-documented puzzled me to no end and actually dove tailed with my reading of this book. Both items of journalism suffer from the same assumption - that sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you. I'm stymied by the impulse of people who must believe words matter (otherwise why would they be journalists) and yet wish to argue that they don't at all. Unless you're crazy. And weak. Suck it up and tough it out, kid.
I guess I expected something different from this book. What it delivers is okay, but isn't ultimately analytical enough for me to have felt it was really that worthwhile.
FTC Disclosure: San Leandro Public Library
Rating: Green
Reading Challenges: Take Another Change Reading Challenge - Title Word Count
The big secret about Columbine is that there were more involved than just Harris and Klebold. Don’t believe me? Just ask the eyewitnesses:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.whatreallyhappened.com/columbineeight.php
Cullen , who first reported on the story for the online magazine Salon, acknowledges in the book's source notes that thoughts he attributes to Klebold and Harris are conjecture gleaned from the record the pair left behind.
ReplyDeleteJeff Kass takes a more straightforward approach in "Columbine: A True Crime Story," working backward from the events of the fateful day.
The Denver Post
Mr. Cullen insists that the killers enjoyed "far more friends than the average adolescent," with Harris in particular being a regular Casanova who "on the ultimate high school scorecard . . . outscored much of the football team." The author's footnotes do not reveal how he knows this; when I asked him about it while preparing this review, Mr. Cullen said he did not necessarily mean to imply that Harris was sexually active. But what else would such words mean?
"Eric and Dylan never had any girlfriends," the more sober Mr. Kass writes, and were "probably virgins upon death."
Wall Street Journal