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Columbine |  | Author: Dave Cullen
Publisher: Twelve
Category: eBooks
This item is no longer available
Rating:  266 reviews
Sales Rank: 2286
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 373.7888
ASIN: B0024NP4NO
Publication Date: April 3, 2009
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Product Description
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 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 came to stockpile a basement cache of weapons, to record their raging hatred, and to manipulate 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 boy's tapes and diaries, he gives the first 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 hatred, a community rendered helpless, and the police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers-an unforgettable cautionary tale for our times.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 266
 A worthy read. July 23, 2010
Born2Late65 (New York, USA)
Hi,
If you want to get as clear of a picture as you can to understand this tragedy. This book is definitely worth the money. This book is upsetting to read. Those two kids were pretty disgusting. Best points about the book? Enough time has gone by for most of the myths to be shown as such. The FBI Psychologist who evaluated them as best as he could. I view all Psychologists/Psychiatrists w/great suspicion. I often find them nuttier than their patients. I found most of this Psychologist's points to be reasonable. The multiple points of view, & multiple stories are very helpful in understanding as much as we can about this shooting/almost major bombing, & its impact.
The main reason I only gave four out of five stars? In the preface. The Author states how he'll clearly show which data are actual quotes. Which are educated guesses by mental health professionals. Finally, which are HIS summations based on the facts. In his latter chapters, those lines are very hazy. I think it was the last chapter where this was the worst. He states points of view/mind-sets/motivations of the shooters. He attempts to support those conclusions w/the valid Psych evaluations made. They just don't jibe. It appears the Author went to putting his interpretations on the events to the forefront. That's too bad, because he loses credibility by doing so. He lost me as a reader towards the end because of it. To be honest, I was already pretty disgusted by the content @that point, anyway. I went into reading this to try & understand what went wrong w/these kids. IMHO, what went wrong w/Eric, was that he was born. I'd agree that he was a psychopath. Dylan? Although the most assessable data exists on him, & paints a reasonably clear case for his motivations. It still wasn't clear enough for me. He went back & forth between drawing hearts, & then rage-filled carnage. A part of me wanted to see two decent kids who went wrong due to external factors. Based on evidence presented in this book. That's not possible. Dylan, maybe w/more facts, could be forgiven on some level. Eric was w/o redemption. I'm glad I'm through reading this book. It makes me want to bring those two back to life. So I can break every bone in their punk, rich-kid bodies... Just as a pedophile should instinctively know that something is very wrong w/them. These two kids should have realized that THEY were the problem, not basically everyone they had ever met. They attacked, & wanted to kill people from every strata/class/whatever of life. It's just repugnant.
 Well-Researched, Gripping "Novel-Like" Account of Columbine Shooting July 23, 2010
Jenners (East Coast of the U.S.A.)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As Sandy at You've Gotta Read This remarked in her outstanding review of this book, "There are a handful of events in our lives that we use to mark time. When JFK was shot, when Lennon was shot, 9/11...and Columbine. We will forever remember where we were and what we were doing the moment we heard the news." When I heard about the events at Columbine, I was out-of-town at a work meeting. I clearly remember one of my co-workers rushing up to me saying "There's been this horrible shooting at a high school in Colorado. It's all over the news!" Later that night of April 20, 1999, we all huddled around the TV watching the footage and proclaiming our disbelief over and over again. In the end, 13 people were killed and dozens were seriously injured. Countless others bore psychological scarring that affects their lives to this day. And the killers? Well, they shot themselves in the school library--the scene of the greatest carnage--leaving the rest of the world to piece together the reasons for why they did what they did.
Of course, school shootings happened before Columbine and they happened after Columbine, but Columbine seems to stand out as THE school shooting because of the sheer amount of news coverage that it garnered and the myths that grew up around it. For most school shootings, the event was over and done before any news cameras showed up--leaving us with only the tearful survivors to tell us what happened. With Columbine, the media coverage was immediate and ongoing. We saw the students fleeing the school. We witnessed the dead bodies laying outside of the school entrance. We bit our nails anxiously as Patrick Ireland dangled from the library window. The reason Columbine was different was because we--the viewing public--became personal witnesses as the tragedy unfolded in real-time.
As the Columbine story gathered steam in the passing weeks, a variety of myths grew up around the shooting. "The gunmen were bullied by jocks and were targeting jocks to get revenge." "The gunmen were influenced by the music of Marilyn Manson." "A group called the Trench Coat Mafia orchestrated the event." Other myths would take longer to develop but would prove just as durable, particularly the story of Cassie Bernall, who was allegedly shot in the library for acknowledging her belief in God to the gunmen. Eventually and inevitably, the news media moved on to other stories, and we were left with few definitive answers.
In the 10 years following the Columbine shooting, Dave Cullen sifted through a mountain of information--conducting hundreds of interviews, reading thousands of pages of police files, consulting with FBI psychologists, and viewing the tapes and diaries left behind by Harris and Klebold--in order to write a definitive account of what happened that day at Columbine--including what led up to the shooting, what went wrong during the initial response, and the aftermath of the shooting in the community and those permanently scarred either by the loss of loved ones or injury. He also attempts to answer one of the biggest questions that lingers over the specter of the Columbine shooting: Why?
Cullen meticulously documents his sources for each section of the book. When I read the book on my Kindle, the text stopped at 80%. The remaining 20% contained Cullen's documentation of where he got his information for each assertion made in his book. With this type of rigid reporting and documentation, I felt confident when I was reading Columbine that I was reading an account that was as accurate and true as it could possibly be.
Yet although the book is meticulously researched, it reads like a novel. The writing is clear and precise but gripping. As you read, you're drawn in to the story. When Harris and Klebold are roaming the hallways in the aftermath of the first wave of shooting, you feel like you are walking alongside them. When frightened parents gather in the first hours after the shooting--frantically trying to locate their children--you feel their anxiety and stress. The book was emotionally powerful and affecting. When reading it, I dreamt more than once of being in the school with Harris and Klebold coming down the hallway. It was an uncomfortable read, and one that continues to haunt me. Unlike murder mysteries where you know the twisted psyche of a killer is simply the product of the darker corners of an author's imagination, Columbine tells a true story. The events of Columbine happened not so long ago in a place that is probably quite similar to where you live. Columbine haunts us because it reminds us that something like this could happen in our community, to our sons and daughters, in our schools.
Cullen moves back and forth in time throughout the book--describing the myriad of information left behind by Harris and Klebold. As Cullen develops their story, it starts to become clear why Harris and Klebold did what they did. These were not boys who impulsively decided to shoot up their school one day. The Columbine shooting was a meticulously planned campaign of death and destruction that was painstakingly planned and documented by Harris. It turns out that Eric Harris was the mastermind and impetus behind the entire event; Klebold was a reluctant participant who only fully committed himself at the final hour. Harris fully intended to explain what he had in mind and why he did it--leaving behind a huge assortment of material for his audience after the fact.
When reading Columbine, one of the biggest shocks to me was that Harris never intended Columbine to be a school shooting. In fact, Columbine was really a bombing that went south. If things had gone according to plan, Columbine would have resulted in hundreds dead and the total destruction of the school. When I read the scope of his plans and just how much worse Columbine could have been, my jaw dropped to the floor.
Although this isn't an easy book to read, I think that anyone who followed the Columbine story at any level should read this book to finally get an accurate accounting of the whos, whats, whys, wheres and hows of what happened at Columbine High School on that day in April. If you still think that Harris and Klebold were victims of bullying by jocks or that rock music somehow played a part in this tragedy, if you blame the shooting on the parents of Harris and Klebold for raising bad kids, if you wonder what happened in the community of Littleton in the years after the shooting when the cameras went away, you owe it to yourself and the victims of this tragedy to read this book.
Another perspective. July 21, 2010
Patrick O'Neil
I was "away," being a "guest of the state of California" when Columbine happened. But even as incognito as incarceration makes a person - I still heard a great deal about it all. I mean really, who didn't? It was crazy in the news. There was way too much. And even as removed from society as I was and desperate for any kind of contact - I grew very tired of the circus it had turned into. The conjecture tossed liberally around the yard by my fellow detainees was, as you may well imagine, colorful and at the same time horrifying. A lot of them identified with the gun man, or at least with their actions. This was another reason why I avoided the subject - it was another glowing example of why I felt I didn't belong where I was. Not that I hadn't committed the crime for which I was convicted, it was just I never felt as though I really belonged amongst my "peers." Interestingly enough though was the ones who had committed the crime of murder weren't the ones who were vocally supportive of the two kids who did the killings. Perhaps their taste for death had softened? Yet what was also interesting was the rage and anger that the two shooters expressed was, and probably still is, the normal angst filled rhetoric often articulated amongst disgruntle incarcerated guys. The sociopathic dream: payback society and go out in a blaze of glory. Although I'm more than sure 80% of it was, in the vernacular of prison culture, "talking out the side of one's neck." Yet, had Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold lived to be prosecuted, convicted and sentenced, these guys would have been their contemporaries. Some of them would have had "mad" respect for the two boys and the crimes they committed - in prison society they would have been at the top of the food chain - although most probably on death row, not mingling with general population. So yes, I'm going off on a tangent here, but I'm just trying to throw it in perspective.
That said, I'm still sadly intrigued by the entire tragedy and resulting media frenzy. Never having gotten the full story I read Dave Cullen's Columbine with great interest. Cullen's research is amazing. His ability to look at it all from a multitude of sides makes for a genuine discussion. There was so much I had assumed as true that in fact wasn't. There was a lot more I didn't even know. That the press had a lot of it wrong, or even made parts up wasn't surprising. Nor was the police department's hiding of damaging material. What I found particularly unsavory was the opportunistic behavior of the various local churches to use the tragedy for recruitment. Ultimately it is an exposé on American culture - examined through the lens of a horrific event - written by a remarkable author.
The comparison to "In Cold Blood" is an apt one. July 19, 2010
Kate Stokes (Atlanta, GA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book belongs on the same shelf with the greatest true crime books of our time, books such as "The Executioner's Song," "In Cold Blood," "The Devil in the White City" and "The Stranger Beside Me." The unimpeachable gold standard of true crime books, "In Cold Blood," comes to mind often while reading this book. I found this book to be almost as well-written, equally well documented, and even faster paced than Capote's 1966 classic. In fact I don't think I have ever finished a book as fast as I finished this one: less than 48 hours after receipt. It is simply impossible to put down. The author made me feel as though I was right there in the room for many of the events and it was alternately fascinating and horrifying. In addition, it came as a constant surprise to me just how much I didn't know about this case. There is so much more to this case than what you currently know, and this book covers it all. Furthermore, it works on so many more levels than the typical true crime book. It is a detailed examination of a crime and its principals, but it is also an unflinching look at the media, religion, and law enforcement. I can not stress enough just how stunningly great this book is. An unqualified 5 stars and an instant true clime classic.
A MUST READ July 16, 2010
Mommy2mimi
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Find a comfy spot ... Get a box of Kleenex.
This book is hard to put down.
Chilling details. Truths you may not know.
A great learning tool as well for a parent.
Well done Dave C.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 266
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