19. Columbine by David Cullen

19. Columbine by David Cullen

This book was great. Don’t get me wrong, it was a tough read. I cried more while reading this book than any other book I’ve ever read. But the writing was great, and that doesn’t often happen in true crime books, and it seems even more rare when a journalist writes a true crime book.

Mr. Cullen, God bless him, has managed to take a horrific story and not only make you see the humanity of all sides of the story, but he also shows you loads of facts, and he somehow does that without bogging down the reader.

Lots of times if I read a book and there are too many characters in it I’ll get confused and I can’t enjoy the book. Mr. Cullen somehow takes the huge amount of people, makes every one of them important, and through his great writing and wonderful pacing does not lose a single character, no one slips through the cracks.

It’s an amazing piece of work. It’s not slipshod or hackey. In fact, as weird as it sounds it comes across as a labor of love. I mean, who would want to cover that story for 9 years? Most reporters would go and get the news and then move on to the next gig.

A lot of the book was about how the media got most things wrong (the boys weren’t bullied, they were bullies, it wasn’t the heavy metal music that made them do it, they had actually planned it out for a year. etc.), how the sheriff’s dept. covered up a lot of things, and how the survivors handled things and moved on. I think the book also does a good job of showing that the parents of Dylan and Eric had no clue that their sons were capable of such violence.

I was also glad that there were no pictures in the book. In lots of true crime there will be a section in the middle with gory pictures of crime scenes and such, and I’ll admit it, usually I’ll look at the pictures before I even start reading the book. I bet all true crime nerds do. But this book wasn’t like that, it didn’t need pictures. The book was well researched, had excellent writing, perfect pacing, very informative without being boring or dry. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes true crime, any parent/guardian of a teenager, and anyone who works at a high school. I’m not saying that those people should read so that they can prevent this from ever happeneing again. I think they should read it to see how improbable it would be to prevent that from happening.

Tags: true crime