Columbine (Cullen) - Book Reviews
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Book Reviews
Columbine is an excellent work of media criticism, showing how legends become truths through continual citation; a sensitive guide to the patterns of public grief, ... a fine example of old fashioned journalism . . . moving things along with agility and grace.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times Book Review
Exhaustive and supremely level-headed.... The ways in which the Columbine story became distorted in the retelling make for one of the most fascinating aspects of Cullen's book.... 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.... Cullen strikes just the right tone of tough-minded compassion, for the most part steering clear of melodrama, sermonizing and easy answers.
Gary Krist - Washington Post
Cullen's book is a nerve-wracking, methodical and panoramic account.... Columbine has its terrifying sections, particularly during Cullen's minute-by-minute rendering of the chaotic 49-minute assault. He puts us inside and outside the building, and he captures the disbelief viewers experienced in 'almost witnessing mass murder' live on television.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
A staggering achievement.... Rather than burden the deftly written prose with excessive footnotes, Cullen wisely includes a detailed timeline, bibliography and lengthy notes in the back of the book. The 417-page Columbine tears open old wounds but does so with an aching, unflinching clarity that's only possible with hindsight.... [An] admirable, harrowing work...one of the finer nonfiction efforts thus far in 2009.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Comprehensive.... It's a book that hits you like a crime scene photo, a reminder of what journalism at its best is all about. Cullen knows his material from the inside; he covered Columbine, for Salon and Slate primarily,
''beginning around noon on the day of the attack.'' But if this gives him a certain purchase on the story, his perspective is what resonates.
Los Angeles Times
A remarkable book. It is painstakingly reported, well-organized and compellingly written.... For any reader who wants to understand the complicated nature of evil, this book is a masterpiece.
Seattle Times
While the details of the day are indeed gruesome, Cullen neither embellishes nor sensationalizes. His unadorned prose and staccato sections offer welcome relief from the grisly minutiae.... Cullen's honor and reporting skills propel this book beyond tabloid and into true literature.
Newsday
Comprehensively nightmarish.... Cullen's task is difficult not only because the events in question are almost literally unspeakable but also because even as he tells the story of a massacre that took the lives of 15 people, including the killers, he has to untell the stories that have already been told.... Should this story be told at all? There's an element of sick, voyeuristic fascination to it—we don't need an exercise in disaster porn. But Columbine is a necessary book.... The actual events of April 20, 1999, are exactly as appalling as you'd expect, and Cullen doesn't spare us a second of them.
Time
The definitive account, [of the tragedy] will likely be Dave Cullen's Columbine, a nonfiction book that has the pacing of an action movie and the complexity of a Shakespearean drama.... Cullen has a gift, if that's the right word, for excruciating detail. At times the language is so vivid you can almost smell the gunpowder and the fear.
Newsweek
A chilling page-turner, a striking accomplishment given that Cullen's likely readers almost certainly know how the tragic story ends.... I knew Cullen was a dogged reporter and a terrific writer, but even I was blown away by the pacing and story-telling he mastered in Columbine, a disturbing, inspiring work of art.
Salon
From the very first page, I could not put Columbine Dave Cullen's searing narrative, down.... How the killings unfolded, and why, reads like the grisliest of fiction. Would that it were not true.
Entertainment Weekly
Leveraged for political ends by Michael Moore on film and adopted for convenience by the news media as shorthand for teenage violence, Columbine has begun to feel as impenetrable and allegorical as Greek myth. So the intensive reporting of Denver-based journalist Dave Cullen is welcome.... Cullen creates more than a nuanced portrait of school shooters as young men. He writes a human story—a compassionate narrative of teenagers with guns (and bombs, too), and the havoc they wreak on a school, a community, and America.
Esquire
(Starred review.) [R]emarkable.... Cullen not only dispels several of the prevailing myths about the event but tackles the hardest question of all: why did it happen?.... Readers will come away from Cullen's unflinching account with a deeper understanding of what drove these boys to kill..
Publishers Weekly
Library Journal
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.... Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy. Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Kirkus Reviews
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