Columbine, by Dave CullenDenver author Dave Cullen offers what will certainly become essential in understanding the who/when/where (and most importantly, the "why") of the tragedy in Columbine. Cullen also assesses the media's reaction, tracing the origin of several myths and debunking them where appropriate. Columbine is riveting, engaging, sympathetic, well reasoned and thought provoking.
Reviewed by: Scott
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The Denver Post has a different view...
ReplyDeleteDave Cullen and his book, "Columbine," seem to be everywhere in the media these days as the 10th anniversary of the attack approaches. And the reviewers, for the most part, have been dazzled.
Newsweek proclaimed it to be "the definitive account" — a "nonfiction book that has the pacing of an action movie and the complexity of a Shakespearean drama." The Chicago Tribune praised it as an "astonishingly comprehensive look at the incident" that "avoids sensationalism."
True, Cullen did run into a buzz saw in The New York Times, whose reviewer resented his "self-promotion" and "voyeurism," and the book's "thickets of useless data." But while the writer, Janet Maslin, suggested that "Cullen can be sloppy" about "small points," she specified only one: his perhaps erroneous deduction that one killer "had potato skins" shortly before his death.
If only Columbine's flaws were confined to such trivial matters. In fact, Cullen takes liberties on a number of points, a few of them significant. Take the basic question of how Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold fit into the high school scene. Cullen contends they both "had far more friends than the average adolescent." And if Klebold was clueless around girls, Harris "got chicks. Lots and lots of chicks." Indeed, he was a "little charmer" who "outscored much of the football team." As early as age 16, he "made it with a real woman" in her 20s.
Now, Harris and Klebold were hardly loners — the sort of kids who sit alone at lunch — but Cullen doesn't really know if their popularity exceeded that of the "average" adolescent, and acknowledged as much when I questioned him. More surprisingly, he also denied that his book portrays Harris as sexually active, although readers will see it that way. A reviewer for USA Today certainly did.
Did Harris ever have a single girlfriend? "I don't think so," Cullen replied.
As for "Brenda," the 23-year-old who said she had "more than a friendship" with Harris, she seems to have indulged in pathetic fantasies. Although the book neglects to tell us, Brenda had to be advised by authorities five months after the murders to stop claiming prior knowledge of the plot in Internet postings. "She admitted she has no life," an agent for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation wrote in his report.
Cullen's treatment of Klebold is equally curious at times. The author claims the failure of the bombs to go off in the cafeteria while the criminals were waiting in separate locations outside the school "appears to have rattled" Klebold. Yet no one could possibly know this — and the best Cullen could offer when I queried him was to insist that such a reaction was "extremely likely." His book goes on to contend Klebold lost his nerve during a solo foray to the cafeteria once the attack was under way — again, pure speculation — while emphasizing how few shots Klebold took compared to Harris (which is irrelevant to those he murdered at point-blank range). The author also fails to identify Klebold as probably the monster who responded to a plea for help from Lance Kirklin with a shotgun blast to his face (see both the Jefferson County and El Paso sheriffs' reports).
I don't mean to be too hard on the book. It's a well-paced, at times gripping read, and contains great stories regarding Principal Frank DeAngelis, teacher Dave Sanders and his wife, and surviving victims such as Patrick Ireland. It also batters down a number of myths about the attack — although none that readers in metro Denver are likely to still believe. Still, its defects mar what could have been a first-rate account.
The Jeffco sheriff's report was not primarily ridiculed, as Cullen maintains, because it "ducked the central question of why." It was ridiculed because it ducked questions regarding police command decisions. Harris apparently did realize before he died that he would not be accepted by the Marines. And why can't Cullen satisfy himself with observing that Harris and Klebold were apparently intelligent young men rather than repeatedly (and implausibly) insisting on their utter brilliance?
For a more restrained, if less glittering, take on the murders, pick up Jeff Kass' "Columbine: A True Crime Story." Although I could have done without its forays into the sociology of suburbia and the West, and wished Kass had compressed his extensive treatment of Isaiah Schoels' family and their publicity hound spokesman, the book is mostly a no-nonsense look at the crime, its background and Jeffco's coverup.
Kass lets readers see the killers through their own writings (including, in a first, Klebold's plodding essay in his college application), and reveals that Klebold's mother was not only preoccupied by death while a teen — as her son would be — but was apparently featured, under a pseudonym, as a case study in a 1974 book on "inner conflicts."
Kass was a reporter at the Rocky Mountain News, my old haunt, although we barely knew each other. Like Cullen, he has been transfixed by Columbine for a decade. Reading their very different accounts of an attack whose savagery resonates to this day, a reader will understand why.
Thanks for your comment, Anon! It's great to hear differing opinions about a book. Keep the conversation going.
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