Review: Columbine - Dave Cullen

 

 

Review: Columbine - Dave Cullen - April 2009

One thing I have always been fascinated in but not in an icky weird way is school shootings. Not sure why, but I also have a fascination with the psychopathy of the killers themselves and why they do the things they do. Growing up as I was 12 when Columbine happened we have heard stories of what happened , but it wasn't till recently when I saw this book come through at the library , I thought Hmmm I want to read this. Columbine is said to be one of America's most notorious school shootings , but this book doesn't touch base on those who died but Eric and Dylan themselves. It delves into the type of people they were and what drove them to do this. I found it fascinating reading about them as Eric had come across as a Mr Suave and Charmer and your usual bad boy who always had a date, but he wanted more but was never able to experience a real "romance" something with substance. Dylan on the other hand was a Christian , went to church and youth group and dated a lovely Christian girl who actually we learn helped Dylan acquire two of the guns used as he had lied to her and told her they were for a hunting trip. 

Author Dave Cullen writes this about his book :

"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 best complete account of the Columbine tragedy.

Columbine is a read that anyone interested in the working mind of a psychopath or studying criminology should read.