Book #94: Columbine

Title: Columbine
Author: Dave Cullen

This probably wasn't the best book for us to listen to on our family car trip to Mesa Verde a few weeks ago. It would have been a great book if there had only been adults in the car, but when you're reading a nonfiction book about psychopathic and depressive teenagers who turn into mass-murderers, you can probably be fairly well assured that what you read won't be appropriate for the five-year-old in the back seat.

We should have turned the book off, but we were too engrossed. Readers have compared Columbine to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and I think the comparison really works. Columbine is the story of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School near Denver, and specifically the story of the motivations of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the shooters who killed twelve students and a teacher and injured many more. In the years Cullen spent researching and constructing the book, he gained access to journals and videotapes from Eric and Dylan, interviews from most of the survivors and many of the relatives of the fallen, and was able to create a novelistic portrait of the events of April 20th, as well as the years leading up to and following that day.

Columbine is an intense book. It was eventually too intense to listen to with our kids in the car, and as I've listened to it in bits and pieces since, I've learned to pace myself. Listening to it for an hour down to Provo and an hour back as I went to training this week proved too much, but listening for half an hour was okay. It's hard to hear about how children can turn into murderers, and I found that the characters I felt the most identification with and sorrow for (see, Cullen paints them so clearly that they seem like characters) were Tom and Sue Klebold and Wayne and Kathy Harris, parents who tried hard to raise their boys right and didn't realize how troubled they were.