*Starred Review* Although much has been written about the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, little of it has helped to explain why two high-school students went on a rampage, killing 13 people and wounding scores of others. Cullen, acclaimed expert on Columbine, offers a penetrating look at the motivation and intent of the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Drawing on interviews, police records, media coverage, and diaries and videotapes left behind by the shooters, Cullen examines the killers’ beliefs and psychological states of mind. Chilling journal entries show a progression from adolescent angst to psychopathic rage as they planned a multistage killing spree that included bombs that ultimately didn’t detonate. Cullen goes beyond detailing the planning and execution of the shootings, delving into the early lives of the killers as well. He explores the aftermath for the town of Littleton, Colorado: survivors’ stories, investigation into how the sheriff’s department mishandled the crisis, several ongoing legal issues, exploitation of the shooting by some religious groups and sensationalists, and the school’s battle to regain its identity. Cullen debunks several Columbine myths, including the goth angle and a martyrdom story of a girl who proclaimed her belief in God before she was killed. Graphic and emotionally vivid; spectacularly researched and analyzed. --Vanessa Bush
Review
COLUMBINE is a remarkable achievement. Cullen has brought illumination to a dark and difficult topic, and the result is an example of literary nonfiction at its finest: masterful, clear-eyed, bold - and unforgettable." (Charlotte Observer)
"A gripping study . . . To his credit, Mr. Cullen does not simply tear down Columbine's legends. He also convincingly explains what really sparked the murderous rage . . . disquieting . . . beautifully written." (The New York Observer)
"Cullen's book is a nerve-wracking, methodical and panoramic account...COLUMBINE has its terrifying sections, particularly during Cullen's minute-by-minute rendering of the chaotic 49-minute assault. He puts us inside and outside the building, and he captures the disbelief viewers experienced in 'almost witnessing mass murder' live on television." (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
"The definitive account, [of the tragedy] will likely be Dave Cullen's COLUMBINE, a nonfiction book that has the pacing of an action movie and the complexity of a Shakespearean drama . . . Cullen has a gift, if that's the right word, for excruciating detail. At times the language is so vivid you can almost smell the gunpowder and the fear." (Newsweek)
"Exhaustive and supremely level-headed . . . The ways in which the Columbine story became distorted in the retelling make for one of the most fascinating aspects of Cullen's book . . . Hopping back and forth in time, Cullen manages to tell this complicated story with remarkable clarity and coherence. As one of the first reporters on the scene in 1999, he has been studying this event firsthand for a decade, and his book exudes a sense of authority missing from much of the original media coverage. ...Cullen strikes just the right tone of tough-minded compassion, for the most part steering clear of melodrama, sermonizing and easy answers." (Washington Post Gary Krist)
From the very first page, I could not put COLUMBINE Dave Cullen's searing narrative, down. Dylan ... How the killings unfolded, and why, reads like the grisliest of fiction. Would that it were not true. Grade: A" (Entertainment Weekly)
"Comprehensively nightmarish . . . Cullen's task is difficult not only because the events in question are almost literally unspeakable but also because even as he tells the story of a massacre that took the lives of 15 people, including the killers, he has to untell the stories that have already been told . . . Should this story be told at all? There's an element of sick, voyeuristic fascination to it--we don't need an exercise in disaster porn. But Columbine is a necessary book. . . . The actual events of April 20, 1999, are exactly as appalling as you'd expect, and Cullen doesn't spare us a second of them." (Time)
"COLUMBINE is an excellent work of media criticism, showing how legends become truths through continual citation; a sensitive guide to the patterns of public grief, foreshadowing many of the reactions to Sept. 11 (lawsuits, arguments about the memorial, voyeuristic bus tours); and, at the end of the day, a fine example of old fashioned journalism . . . moving things along with agility and grace." (The New York Times Review of Books Jennifer Senior)
"A remarkable book. It is painstakingly reported, well-organized and compellingly written . . . For any reader who wants to understand the complicated nature of evil, this book is a masterpiece." (The Seattle Times)
While the details of the day are indeed gruesome, Cullen neither embellishes nor sensationalizes. His unadorned prose and staccato sections offer welcome relief from the grisly minutiae... Cullen's honor and reporting skills propel this book beyond tabloid and into true literature." (Newsday)
"Leveraged for political ends by Michael Moore on film and adopted for convenience by the news media as shorthand for teenage violence, Columbine has begun to feel as impenetrable and allegorical as Greek myth. So the intensive reporting of Denver-based journalist Dave Cullen is welcome. . . Cullen creates more than a nuanced portrait of school shooters as young men. He writes a human story - a compassionate narrative of teenagers with guns (and bombs, too), and the havoc they wreak on a school, a community, and America. (Esquire)
"In this remarkable account of the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School shooting, journalist Cullen not only dispels several of the prevailing myths about the event but tackles the hardest question of all: why did it happen? Drawing on extensive interviews, police reports and his own reporting, Cullen meticulously pieces together what happened when 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 13 people before turning their guns on themselves.... Cullen expertly balances the psychological analysis-enhanced by several of the nation's leading experts on psychopathology-with an examination of the shooting's effects on survivors, victims' families and the Columbine community. Readers will come away from Cullen's unflinching account with a deeper understanding of what drove these boys to kill, even if the answers aren't easy to stomach." (Publishers Weekly, Starred Reivew)
"A chilling page-turner, a striking accomplishment given that Cullen's likely readers almost certainly know how the tragic story ends...I knew Cullen was a dogged reporter and a terrific writer, but even I was blown away by the pacing and story-telling he mastered in Columbine, a disturbing, inspiring work of art." (Salon)
"Comprehensive...It's a book that hits you like a crime scene photo, a reminder of what journalism at its best is all about. Cullen knows his material from the inside; he covered Columbine, for Salon and Slate primarily, 'beginning around noon on the day of the attack.' But if this gives him a certain purchase on the story, his perspective is what resonates." (LA Times)
About the Author
Dave Cullen is a journalist and author who has contributed to Slate, Salon, and the New York Times. He is considered the nation's foremost authority on the Columbine killers, and has also written extensively on Evangelical Christians, gays in the military, politics, and pop culture. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Boulder, Cullen has won several writing awards, including a GLAAD Media Award, Society of Professional Journalism awards, and several Best of Salon citations.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Gary Krist It just keeps happening. Dunblane, Scotland. Littleton, Colo. Erfurt, Germany. Virginia Tech. Two separate incidents in Finland. And now, just last month, Winnenden, Germany. The litany of school massacres around the world is already far too long, and it shows no signs of ending. Each new tragedy arrives with a plunging sense of déjà vu: the ravaged school buildings draped in crime-scene tape, the clusters of frightened teenagers in parking lots, the grainy prom-night photos of the victims. We feel we've already watched the shaky cellphone videos and heard the terrified calls to 911. And we recognize the shooters, too: the troubled and resentful young loners, hollow-eyed, pimple-faced, utterly harmless-looking, except when clad in black and armed like Rambo. Sad to say, we think we know this story all too well by now. In "Columbine," his exhaustive and supremely level-headed examination of the Littleton school massacre, journalist Dave Cullen demonstrates that we really don't know this story. Drawing on almost 10 years of research -- including hundreds of interviews, 25,000 pages of documents and the journals, notebooks and videotapes of the perpetrators -- he has assembled a comprehensive account of what really happened at Columbine High School on Tuesday, April 20, 1999. And his conclusion is arresting: namely, that the public's understanding of this supposedly archetypal mass shooting is almost entirely wrong: "We remember Columbine," Cullen writes, "as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and [then] tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened. No Goths, no outcasts, nobody snapping. No targets, no feud, and no Trench Coat Mafia. Most of those elements existed at Columbine -- which is what gave them such currency. They just had nothing to do with the murders." Far from feckless pariahs, in fact, the two shooters in the Columbine case -- Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold -- were smart, reasonably popular kids who doled out more bullying than they ever suffered. Their shooting spree was not some precipitous act of revenge against specific tormentors, but more like an elaborately planned theater piece, worked out almost a year in advance, designed to demonstrate their innate superiority by indiscriminately killing as many victims as possible. Harris and Klebold, moreover, were hardly cookie-cutter assassins. As Cullen depicts him, Harris was a sadistic and expertly manipulative psychopath, charming when he wanted to be, capable of simulating remorse, goodwill or cooperation if it helped him get his way. His underlying motivation was relatively simple: "I hate the [expletive] world," he complained in his journal. Klebold, on the other hand, was a tortured, erratic depressive who whined at length in his notebooks about love and romance even as he fulminated about "the real people (gods)" -- i.e., himself and Harris -- being "slaves to the majority of zombies." Klebold's aggression was inwardly directed and complex: "Good god I HATE my life," he wrote, "i want to die really bad now." The ways in which the Columbine story became distorted in the retelling makes for one of the most fascinating aspects of Cullen's book. It is, of course, a basic human tendency to cope with complex, emotionally freighted events like Columbine by recasting them into narrative patterns that we can recognize and more easily understand. In this process, the media (with the notable exceptions, according to Cullen, of the Rocky Mountain News and The Washington Post) were more than a little complicit, broadcasting unfounded rumors and lending credence to the testimony of alleged witnesses with ready-made explanations for what had happened. The police were better informed, but in their efforts to avoid compromising their investigation (and to cover up some damning evidence of their own incompetence), they refused to release many crucial documents until years after the tragedy. Meanwhile, some people in Littleton proved all too willing to embrace misinformation to advance their own agendas. Evangelical preachers, for instance, gave wide currency to an inspiring story of one victim's profession of faith before dying, even though evidence indicates that the incident never really happened. Hopping back and forth in time, Cullen manages to tell this complicated story with remarkable clarity and coherence. As one of the first reporters on the scene in 1999, he has been studying this event firsthand for a decade, and his book exudes a sense of authority missing from much of the original media coverage. The potential pitfalls in a project like this are many; accounts of suffering as fresh and as horrifying as this always carry a whiff of voyeuristic exploitation about them. But Cullen strikes just the right tone of tough-minded compassion, for the most part steering clear of melodrama, sermonizing and easy answers. Will "Columbine" and other accounts help us avoid the next school shooting? It would be encouraging to think so. But this epidemic is proving to be dauntingly tenacious. After each new outbreak of violence, we go to ever greater lengths to investigate the causes and understand the perpetrators. We interview parents, teachers and friends. We reexamine school policies, revamp social services, modify gun laws and police response protocols. And yet the litany keeps getting longer.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Columbine
By Dave CullenGrand Central Publishing
Copyright © 2010 Dave Cullen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-446-54692-8
Chapter One
Mr. D * * *
He told them he loved them. Each and every one of them. He spoke without notes but chose his words carefully. Frank DeAngelis waited out the pom-pom routines, the academic awards, and the student-made videos. After an hour of revelry, the short, middle-aged man strode across the gleaming basketball court to address his student body. He took his time. He smiled as he passed the marching band, the cheerleaders, and the Rebels logo painted beneath flowing banners proclaiming recent sports victories. He faced two thousand hyped-up high school students in the wooden bleachers and they gave him their full attention. Then he told them how much they meant to him. How his heart would break to lose just one of them.
It was a peculiar sentiment for an administrator to express to an assembly of teenagers. But Frank DeAngelis had been a coach longer than a principal, and he earnestly believed in motivation by candor. He had coached football and baseball for sixteen years, but he looked like a wrestler: compact body with the bearing of a Marine, but without the bluster. He tried to play down his coaching past, but he exuded it.
You could hear the fear in his voice. He didn't try to hide it, and he didn't try to fight back the tears that welled up in his eyes. And he got away with it. Those kids could sniff out a phony with one whiff and convey displeasure with snickers and fumbling and an audible current of unrest. But they adored Mr. D. He could say almost anything to his students, precisely because he did. He didn't hold back, he didn't sugarcoat it, and he didn't dumb it down. On Friday morning, April 16, 1999, Principal Frank DeAngelis was an utterly transparent man.
Every student in the gymnasium understood Mr. D's message. There were fewer than thirty-six hours until the junior-senior prom, meaning lots of drinking and lots of driving. Lecturing the kids would just provoke eye rolling, so instead he copped to three tragedies in his own life. His buddy from college had been killed in a motorcycle accident. "I can remember being in the waiting room, looking at his blood," he said. "So don't tell me it can't happen." He described holding his teenage daughter in his arms after her friend died in a flaming wreck. The hardest had been gathering the Columbine baseball team to tell them one of their buddies had lost control of his car. He choked up again. "I do not want to attend another memorial service."
"Look to your left," he told them. "Look to your right." He instructed them to study the smiling faces and then close their eyes and imagine one of them gone. He told them to repeat after him: "I am a valued member of Columbine High School. And I'm not in this alone." That's when he told them he loved them, as he always did.
"Open your eyes," he said. "I want to see each and every one of your bright, smiling faces again Monday morning."
He paused. "When you're thinking about doing something that could get you in trouble, remember, I care about you," he said. "I love you, but remember, I want us all together. We are one large family, we are-"
He left the phrase dangling. That was the students' signal. They leapt to their feet and yelled: "COL-um-BINE!"
Ivory Moore, a dynamo of a teacher and a crowd rouser, ran out and yelled, "We are COL-um-BINE."
COL-um-BINE!"
It was louder now, and their fists were pumping in the air.
"COL-um-BINE!"
"COL-um-BINE!"
"COL-um-BINE!"
"COL-um-BINE!" Louder, faster, harder, faster-he whipped them into a frenzy. Then he let them go.
They spilled into the hallways to wrap up one last day of classes. Just a few hours until the big weekend.
* * *
All two thousand students would return safely on Monday morning, after the prom. But the following afternoon, Tuesday, April 20, 1999, twenty-four of Mr. D's kids and faculty members would be loaded into ambulances and rushed to hospitals. Thirteen bodies would remain in the building and two more on the grounds. It would be the worst school shooting in American history-a characterization that would have appalled the boys just then finalizing their plans.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Columbineby Dave Cullen Copyright © 2010 by Dave Cullen. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Colorado journalist Dave Cullen's meticulous research dispels the myths and hasty assumptions surrounding the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. Cullen's conclusions are drawn from hundreds of interviews and the wealth of information left behind by shooters Harris and Klebold. Apparently, Columbine was a painstakingly planned bombing gone wrong. Only when the bombs failed to detonate did the shooting begin. Don Leslie's nuanced reading of the disturbing material makes clear that the boys were not goths, gay, or bullied. Leslie is mesmerizing as he makes Cullen's case that Harris was predisposed to psychopathy and Klebold was erratic, depressed, and suicidal. Once they got together, the dyad became deadly. If this important book were fiction, it would be devastating. Knowing it really happened is heartbreaking. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
The fundamental nature of a psychopath is a failure to feel. A psychopath’s grasp of fear and suffering is particularly weak.Highlighted by 277 Kindle readers
