Book Review: 'Columbine'

Tragedies have a tendency to ingrain themselves into a person's memory. I vividly remember the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and I can easily recall exactly where I was when Princess Diana died. The same can be said about the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School massacre. The image of students running out of the school, hands on their heads, is one I'll probably never forget.

That said, Dave Cullen's book "Columbine" forced me to look back and critically examine my own perception of the shootings. The author visited the school at noon on the day of the shootings, and spent the next decade performing painstaking research in order to provide an accurate account of the day's events, along what preceded and what followed. Cullen listened, interviewed, read and watched for 10 years, and "Columbine" is the end result.

The book Cullen released in 2009 is simultaneously informative, gripping, fast-paced, compassionate and, perhaps most of all, monumentally important.

To my surprise, "Columbine" is a page-turner. Not a word of it is boring or slow, and that's high praise for a book covering an event we all thought we had heard everything about. Much of the book deals with what led Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to bring guns and bombs into their high school. Thankfully, Cullen gets right to the point; he provides a minute-by-minute account of the shooting early on, and peppers chapters telling about the killers' preceding actions and motivations throughout. Equal attention is paid to the aftermath.

By covering so many of the multidimensional and multifaceted aspects of the Columbine massacre, Cullen presents what seems to be the most comprehensive and accessible account available today. We hear from survivors, their families, law enforcement officials, psychologists, and more involved parties.

All this would be in vain if it weren’t for Cullen’s presentation. The structure at work here is brilliant, the pacing quick and expert. The author alternates between different timelines, which proves an effective and intriguing way to keep the reader informed on all fronts while moving everything along.

This is a respectful, interesting and eye-opening account of a massacre that badly needed a “Mythbusters”. The amount of false information we were presented with in 1999 and in the years following is positively astounding. Cullen gives us the facts on a wide range of myths and misconceptions. I finished the book with a distinctly different perspective on this tragedy, and I believe it’s for the better.

Read “Columbine”. It covers an event that helped define a generation, yet one I discovered I knew little about. The amount of research done by Cullen is astounding, and this provides an uncanny level of accuracy, authenticity and respect. That’s certainly a relief; an event like this deserves this kind of literary treatment. It’s a harrowing, heart-wrenching, and ultimately rewarding read.