Columbine by Dave Cullen

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Columbine -- it used to represent a lovely blue flower that grows in the West. Sadly, it now has a different, much darker legacy of terrified students and of a pair of killers who did away with themselves before they could answer any of our questions. Columbine has also come to stand for a flawed response by the authorities, and has spurred a whole new protocol for combating school violence. But what do we really know about what happened?

Way too little, according to Cullen, whose thrilling book was ten years in the making. And he should know. Cullen was on the scene from day one, and in the years since, has pored over hundreds of interviews, read 25,000 pages of evidence, and reviewed countless hours of video and audiotape. As a result, he's uniquely qualified to dispel many rumors that were reported as fact, and to offer a new explanation behind Harris and Klebold's deadly rampage.

Were the two boys outcasts or Goths? Did they really target jocks or Christians? How much planning did they do, and did anyone help? Was the same motivation driving both of them? Cullen brings to light new truths central to the attacks in a book that should be required reading for anyone who wants to make sure no other high school suffers the fate of the one in Littleton, Colorado. (Summer 2009 Selection)

From the Publisher

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, irrevocable 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 first complete account of the Columbine tragedy.

The New York Times - Jennifer Senior

It's to his credit that Cullen…makes the reader care about getting it right. 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 same 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. While Cullen's storytelling doesn't approach the novelistic beauty of In Cold Blood (an unfair standard, perhaps, but an unavoidable comparison for a murder story this detailed), he writes well enough, moving things along with agility and grace.

Publishers Weekly

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. The media spin was that specific students, namely jocks, were targeted and that Dylan and Eric were members of the Trench Coat Mafia. According to Cullen, they lived apparently normal lives, but under the surface lay "an angry, erratic depressive" (Klebold) and "a sadistic psychopath" (Harris), together forming a "combustible pair." They planned the massacre for a year, outlining their intentions for massive carnage in extensive journals and video diaries. 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. (Apr. 6)

Library Journal

Relying on more than ten years of research, award-winning journalist Cullen (www.davecullen.com) here pieces together a stunning, authoritative, full-scope view of the Columbine tragedy, reaching powerful and controversial conclusions and revealing several facts previously unknown to the public. Don Leslie (The 48 Laws of Power) reads with both sensation and objectivity, escalating emotion during the often graphic diary passages and helping the story to flow. However, the narrative's continual jumping back and forth in time may confuse listeners. For Ann Rule and Jon Krakauer fans. [The Twelve: Hachette hc, a New York Times best seller, was recommended as "definitely worth reading despite the disjointed narrative," LJ 3/15/09.—Ed.]—Terry Ann Lawler, Phoenix P.L.

Kirkus Reviews

Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.."We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened," writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school's main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers' cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal "The Book of God" and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold's frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author's distracting tendency to weave the killers'expressions into his sentences—for example, "The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass." Cullen is better at depicting the attack's aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy..Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.

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Table of Contents