Columbine
Columbine book cover

Columbine

Hardcover – April 6, 2009

by
Price
$27.50
Format
Hardcover
Pages
432
Publisher
Twelve
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0446546935
Dimensions
6.5 x 1.32 x 9.25 inches
Weight
1.5 pounds

Description

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. 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) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine Many reviewers were more concerned with coming to grips with the attack rather than assessing the book, but their concern may be a testament to Cullen’s work. His reporting fundamentally reframes the event: Columbine, he writes, should be thought of as a failed bombing rather than a school shooting. Furthermore, much of the conventional wisdom about how to prevent such attacks—essentially, watch out for pimply outcasts with a grudge—is confounded by an investigation into Harris’s and Klebold’s actual lives. Most critics, with Janet Maslin a notable exception, thought that Cullen’s account helps us to better wring meaning from the tragedy. In sum, Columbine “is an excellent work of media criticism, showing how legends become truths through continual citation” (New York Times Book Review).Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC From Booklist *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,xa0killing 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 "Salon magazine's Dave Cullen has been on top of the Columbine story from the start... We don't like our evil to be banal. Ten years after 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. Read more

Features & Highlights

  • Ten years in the works, a masterpiece of reportage, this is the definitive account of the Columbine massacre, its aftermath, and its significance, from the acclaimed journalist who followed the story from the outset.
  • "The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror . . ." So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. In the wake of Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this plague grows more urgent every year. What really happened April 20, 1999? The horror left an indelible stamp on the American psyche, but most of what we "know" is wrong. It wasn't about jocks, Goths, or the Trench Coat Mafia. Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on scene, and spent ten years on this book-widely recognized as the definitive account. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings-several reproduced in a new appendix. Cullen paints raw portraits of two polar opposite killers. They contrast starkly with the flashes of resilience and redemption among the survivors. Expanded with a New Epilogue

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

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Most Helpful Reviews

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Don't You Believe It

I picked up a copy of Dave Cullen's "Columbine" because of the fine reviews it received, and while reading it I was amazed that most of what I had read or seen about the Columbine massacre was wrong or blown out of proportion. Typical, I thought. It's the nature of the news media, particularly broadcast news, to distort a story if it will attract viewers. If you want the genuine facts, best read a book, one from a respected publisher.

Some of the myths Cullen debunks are
* That Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were part of something called The Trench-Coat Mafia. There never was such a thing as a Trench-Coat Mafia, and the only reason the two wore trench coats on the day of the massacre was so that they could conceal their weapons.
* That both boys were very unpopular and social misfits, when in fact, both attended the school prom on the weekend before the killings, and Harris was popular with girls, even an older girl.
* That the boys were bullied by the school jocks, when they weren't, and Dylan was somewhat the athlete in his younger days.

He also makes it clear, over and over, that Dylan Klebold was merely depressed and was unenthusiastic about attacking the school, but that he was pressured into the murders by Eric Harris.

After finishing the book I was going to post an enthusiastic review here, but then I saw the negative review by Randy Brown --whose name I of course recognized at once-- as well as his outraged comments under the positive reviews. Randy Brown and his wife are discussed at length in the book because their son Brooks was a close childhood friend of Dylan Klebold (and to a lesser degree Eric Harris), until he had a falling out with Harris and became the prolonged target of their wrath. (Ironically, Harris spared the life of Brooks just before the massacre started.)

At first, I agreed with the people who sneered at Randy Brown for being too emotionally involved in the situation to offer a rational opinion of the book and for failing to disclose that Brooks Brown had himself written a book about the incident.

But then, curious to see if any more material had been released subsequent to this book's publication, I did a search and found a lot of footage about Columbine at YouTube, including a 50-minute British documentary which interviewed a lot of the people who are mentioned in this book, showed the security camera tapes from the school, and featured quite a bit of footage made by Dylan and Eric themselves.

Seeing that changed my mind completely. If you are interested in this book, you should first watch that video. It becomes apparent that Dave Cullen's "Columbine" is an attempt by someone who was not directly involved in the real Columbine to force the details of the massacre conform to his notions of it.

If there was no "Trench-Coat Mafia," then why do all the the videos that Dylan and Eric made of themselves, some shot long before the actual massacre, show them in trench coats? Klebold's father is heard phoning the police on the day of the shootings, advising them that his son may be involved, "Because he's in the Trench-Coat Mafia."

There is actual footage in the documentary of them being bullied by jocks.

Brooks Brown, who must've known Dylan and Eric better than anyone else, is shown describing the two as being "the lowest of the low" in the school's pecking order -- the most socially outcast people in the entire school.

In the video footage showing Dylan Klebold, he certainly doesn't appear to be a reluctant follower of Eric Harris. Just the opposite -- he seems to be having the best time of his life.

So who y'gonna believe? Cullen? Or your own eyes?

I think that everyone who left those snotty and patronizing remarks under Randy Brown's review should be ashamed of themselves. Y'know, opinions are like [rectums]; everybody has one. But he was there. Where were you?
87 people found this helpful
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We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

Cullen is a journalist who has followed the Columbine story for some time. This is a thoughtful book that attempts to debunk the instant myths that our culture inevitably creates to explain a tragedy like this. Cullen argues that the killers were not bullied outcasts who targeted specific victims; that one victim was not in fact shot in the face for telling the killers that she believed in God; and that the law enforcement personnel on the scene quickly realized that this was not a hostage negotiation scenario and moved to assault the killers, though the whole effort involved a great deal of wasted time. Cullen does believe that the biggest law enforcement failing was the cover up of a file that the County had on the killers, viz., complaints about threats of violence by one of them, that arguably should have resulted in aggressive action that may have preempted the whole tragedy. Hindsight being 20/20, I don't necessarily buy that argument, but any cover up is unpardonable.

Cullen's most important observation is that the killers planned an extermination of the entire school via incendiary bombs that never went off. Had they been triggered competently, a fire could have destroyed much of the School and the two killers (Eric and Dylan) were camped out to shoot those who fled the exits. They even booby trapped the parking lot to blow up rescuing forces. Had the plan worked, thousands would have died. Instead, they shot a number of students, killing 13, and then killed themselves.

The motive, Cullen argues, was that these two youths hated the high school, hated themselves, and hated the whole world. Bringing the high school down with them was, for them, bringing their whole little world down with them. There is some appeal to this explanation when we consider the profound and sometimes violent emotions of adolescence and the alienation, depression, rage, and anxiety that the high school environment can inspire. Dylan and Eric are compelling not because they are monsters, but because we share many of their experiences, rage, and anxieties -- but they, for some reason, were overcome with the rage and went all the way down a path that none of us ever did. In this sense, Cullen undercuts his thesis with his "psychopath" diagnosis. Yes, these kids evolved to a point that they profoundly lacked all empathy, but why the diagnosis of Eric as someone who is totally outside the margins of our common experience -- as, essentially, a monster? He's scary because in some respects he resembles all of us. We have created a high school environment and culture that's very hard and alienating on these kids. Maybe there is no better way, but Eric and Dylan are not monsters. They are kids we can relate to in some respects, but ones who were able to do monstrous things by taking things to the extreme in the hothouse environment of coming of age.

The leading negative review questions the accuracy of much of Cullen's account. I can't comment on that, though one weakness of the book is that Cullen does not give us enough of the raw data from the basement tapes and other sources and is too busy interpreting for us.

Another weakness of the book is its organization. I think a chronological narrative in the form of "In Cold Blood" would have been more effective. Instead, he tells part of the tale, then jumps around in time. In addition, Cullen's uses slang and tends to "write down" to the reader.

Despite these criticisms, this is a very good and thoughtful book. Too often we are absorbed by a story like this when it occurs and don't go back to sift fact from fiction and to think hard about what the tragedy really means. Cullen's book attempts to do precisely that.
51 people found this helpful
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Outstanding

This is a brilliantly written, authoritative book, the product of 10 years of research and personal passion by a very talented reporter and writer. The bulk of Cullen's material was already in the public domain (if not, admittedly, remotely in the public eye), so those of us who have followed Columbine closely might have wondered what this book had to add.

The answer: a gripping read from first page to last that takes us deep into the mindset of the community and, most chillingly, the minds of the killers. It's compelling and disturbing stuff. I might have preferred a slightly more sociological take on the Columbine universe and the monsters produced by a place of oppressive suburban uniformity, unspoken social snobbery, religious fervor, and a stifling, occasionally hostile, drive to conformism. Cullen's line, for the most part, is that it was all driven by the psychology of the killers, and could have happened anywhere. I think there's a little more to be said than that. There are reasons almost all school shootings/attacks happen in remote areas and/or in bland, homogeneous suburbs, and there are ways of telling the Columbine story to illuminate some of those reasons.

That, though, is a small quibble when the reporting is so compelling and the writing (especially the structure of the narrative) little short of breath-taking.

Highly recommended.
23 people found this helpful
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Thoroughly researched, but went off course at times

Everyone who was old enough to understand what had happened on April 20, 1999 will be very surprised when they read Dave Cullen's Columbine. It is an intensive study of every known detail & fact related to the crime, fortunately for the readers Cullen spares nothing while he attempts to erase the rumors obscuring the true natures of both the massacre & its perpetrators. Whether it is the much derided Trench Coat Mafia (TCM) or the truth about modern day martyr Cassie Bernall, Cullen accurately & eloquently discloses to the reader what the media chose not to.

Most pertinent questions that are answered:

1. What motivated each of the killers?

2. Were they targeting jocks? Was this a case of bullying gone bad?

3. Could it have been prevented?

4. How have the parents reacted? (Personally, after reading this I pity the Harrises & the Klebolds, while disagreeing with the actions of a few parents namely Brian Rohrbough for his petty actions.)

Many people have been sidetracked by the reactions of the parents which can be borderline ridiculous & unthoughtful towards others, police ineptitude, rumors of abuse, etc., but Cullen's work mainly focuses upon the fact that this story is merely about a psychopath (Eric Harris) who found a depressive (Dylan Klebold) & how their friendship evolved into a murderous dyad. They fed off each other & it can be surmised that if Eric had not been around in Dylan's life, perhaps the worst that Dylan would have experienced is his own suicide rather than a rampage.

The flaws of the book mainly lie in the fact that Eric is portrayed as a popular kid rather than as an outcast. Maybe he had more luck with girls than we originally thought, but it isn't accurate to portray him as a stud. From the interviews & writings of people who knew both boys, it is safe to say that bullying did play a part in this, even to a slight degree it shouldn't be dismissed.
18 people found this helpful
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Essential and timely

[[ASIN:0446546933 Columbine]]

As soon as it arrived I moved COLUMBINE to the top of my "to read" stack. After the first few pages, I was riveted. I felt like I knew the handful of characters that moved the story forward. The timeline covered not just the massacre itself, but the boys' lives for years before, and the survivors for years after. I found that scrupulous research and documentation plus a superb storytelling style formed an extraordinary combination. There is much to be learned from this important book.

I found these reviews which describe the quality of the book:

Very Short List: "[A] comprehensive, compulsively readable profile of the killers, the victims, and the surrounding community....Throughout, Cullen refuses to sensationalize..."

Kirkus Reviews: "Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre....Carefully researched and chilling..."

Library Journal: "Cullen clarifies a lot of misconceptions that evolved soon after the tragedy and provides new insights into why it occurred, which makes the book definitely worth reading..."
14 people found this helpful
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The only book I'll ever have to read on Columbine

Columbine is one of those national nightmare stories I usually avoid reading about as it occurs. The first reports are always 90% sensationalism and 10% fact. I often don't know how to separate one from the other.

COLUMBINE, by Dave Cullen, does the job for us. This book is, in a word, brilliant. It deftly weaves multiple storylines - the planning of the attack, the attack itself and the aftermath for the many who were directly affected - and makes for as compelling a non-fiction page turner as I've read in many years. It is truly "everything about Columbine you didn't know to ask." There was a large part of me resistant to reading COLUMBINE (it's hard to think of a sadder American story), but within a few pages, I was hooked. Cullen gives us the who, what, when and where, and spends a goodly portion giving us the "why" and the "what then". The sections dealing with the survivors and the friends and family of the victims are heart-rending and life-affirming without venturing into tabloid territory.

If you only read one book on Columbine, this would be the one.
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Author inaccurate? Make sure to read the "Author's Note on Sources"

As you read these reviews, you will see kudos for well-researched, engaging narrative writing and chastisements for gross journalistic inaccuracies. An important factor to consider is on p. ix of the "Author's Note on Sources." Cullen explains, "I often used the killers' thoughts verbatim from their journals, without quotation marks." So, if Cullen writes that Eric got "lots and lots of chicks," he may be lifting that comment from Eric's journal (or Dylan's) rather than making an "accurate" journalistic account of how Eric actually lived his life. It's important to consider this unusual writing device because Cullen is making a crucial distinction: What is truth to Eric and Dylan can venture far from what is reality. This collage of their actual journal entries integrated into Cullen's narrative, without the disruption of quotation marks, is what makes this book such an engaging read.
13 people found this helpful
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A comprehensive study of the Columbine shootings.

I'm giving this book 5 stars because I think it is a well-written study of the events of the shootings as well as the pre and post activities of the murderers and victims. I've read many true crime books and Cullen seems to have done a good, dispassionate job exploring all the aspects of the crime.

I do wish he had included pictures in the book.
11 people found this helpful
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Eh...

Not terribly impressed with this book. Perhaps it was the writing style that put me off, but I did not care for the way the information was presented. If you want to read an amazing book on Columbine, check out No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine. It's written by Rob Merrit & Brooks Brown. Brooks knew Dylan & Eric personally, & this book gave much more of an insiders glance at the lives of these young men.
9 people found this helpful
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we must learn

This is a moving book. I think everyone who works with young people--students in high school, college, elementary school--really should read this. It is painful, at times. I see that some of the people close to the case have given poor ratings, at least one suggesting we move on. Well, until this ill is cured on the societal level, we must not move on. Those most closely touched by this tragedy? Probably--that is up to you. Society as a whole? No. We must learn. We must feel the personal stories of the victims to be motivated most deeply to confront the causes. We must see the perpetrators as humans (flawed humans!) rather than just crazies or evil-doers if we are going to be able to spot the warning signs later, if we are going to know how best to intervene when we do spot warning signs. We need to understand and evaluate the response if we are going to do a better job next time. (Sadly, there will be a next time. What went well? What needs to be done differently? Let's face these questions, even though it may be painful.)

This book does these things well. It gives us great insights into this complex case. It also does this in a highly readable, personal way. It's educational, yes; it's also deeply moving. It is novelistic only in that sense. It is journalistic in the sense that it is thoroughly researched.

You can see from my name that I am not unbiased--I am related to the author. I am also a university administrator with a PhD in higher education, so the topic is of great interest to me beyond my connection to the author. I recommend this book to others in my field, and all, really, in all educational fields. (This is not to say that we are the only ones who should read this book--I also recommend it broadly.)
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