Review: Columbine by David Cullen

Almost anyone who was in high school in the late 1990s - early 2000s remembers April 20, 1999, or more simply "Columbine" -- the day that the word ceased to be the name of a high school, and became the name of the most deadly school shooting to date.  On that day, two teenagers entered their high school, armed with automatic guns and homemade pipe bombs, and slaughtered classmates and teachers indiscriminately, before turning the guns on themselves and committing suicide.  Shock waves resonated across the United States, leaving everyone wondering "Could it have been prevented?  Why would two teenage boys commit such an atrocity?  What caused them to do so?  Can we keep 'Columbine' from happening again?"

Columbine is the result of a decade's worth of gathering information by the author, David Cullen, in an attempt to quash the plethora of rumors surrounding this terrible tragedy and set the record straight.  In the months surrounding the attack, all sorts of stories -- especially about the motives of the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold -- rampaged through the media.  Everything from bullying to Marilyn Manson to the highly-violent computer game Doom was blamed.  But Cullen paints quite a different, equally-mystifying picture of the two antagonists, and why they did what they did.  He takes evidence from both of their respective journals and homemade videos known as the "Basement Tapes", plus forensic evidence taken by the FBI, to show the boys in their true lights: Harris, the dangerous, violent psychopath, driven by his lust for killing and his insatiable desire to mastermind the ultimate massacre, and Dylan, the manic-depressant, whose obsession with finding his true place in the world and equally-futile search for love spiraled him downward into suicidal thoughts.

Besides doing an extensive study into the lives and motives of the two killers, Cullen also interviewed the survivors and the families of the victims, illustrating their struggle to put their lives back together and move on after the tragedy.  It is equally touching and heartbreaking to see the different ways in which the victims' families attempted to move on: from the father who turned his grief into an anger-based crusade to rid the world of guns and abortion, to the parents of questionable martyr Cassie Bernall, who wrote a book about their daughter's life and death as a means of keeping her legacy alive, to the principal who channeled his PTSD into helping a generation of students take back Columbine High School.  All are stories of struggles and triumphs, and all are depicted beautifully, tragically in this book.

In the end, Columbine is as victorious as it is tragic -- the story of a generation of people in a small town learning to rise from the ashes of the most vicious school shooting of the 20th century.

Rating: ****