Book Review: "Columbine" by Dave Cullen

Columbine by Dave Cullen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 Amazon Book 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.



A riveting and well-researched chronicle of the events that led up to the Columbine massacre of 1999 as well as the aftermath for the victims and families of the victims and the killers. Dave Cullen has done such a great job in presenting the narrative of this story based on his 10 years of interviews and research. One of the many valid and eye-opening points that he made was the amount of sensationalism and misinformation that was generated the day of the shooting as well as throughout the aftermath and investigation. He acknowledged his own complicity during those first critical hours and days in reporting information with a solid foundation of fact. He made an interesting analogy that if reporters were to arrive at the scene of a car crash they wouldn't be interesting in speaking to or publishing statements from anyone other than those who witnessed the crash. In the mass shooting of Columbine High School, any and all of the statements that were given were accepted as gospel. In a traumatic situation, much of what a victim recalls can be very inaccurate, yet the story was released that the killers were loners, in with the goth movement and members of The Trench Coat Mafia (they didn't belong) as well as that they systematically searched out jocks and popular kids to kill. All of these assumptions have been proven to be untrue. It goes to show that sensationalism without facts leads to the masses believing what is first reported and accepting that as the truth in a urgent need to immediately understand why something happened. After that, the media relies on pandering to fears to have an audience who is feeds off this. I'm glad I took the time, over 10 years from when the shootings occurred to learn more about what really happened on that tragic day. Unfortunately, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren't the last or the worst of the perpetrators of these type of mass shootings.