| | Today is the pub day for my friend Dave Cullen's debut, COLUMBINE. For the last ten years Dave's been toiling away on this nonfiction account of the April 20, 1999 school shooting and its aftermath, producing a book that--in its intensely detailed portrait of the two killers and just about everything else having to do with that sad moment in history--sheds considerable light on why it happened. I'd been privy to early drafts throughout the process and yet was utterly stunned at how much of a sucker punch it was when I finally read the finished book. To sit and read the entire thing from start to finish forces you to consider that awful day all over again, but despite the unflinching look at the horror, this is not one of those true-crime books that seem to indulge in the gruesome details to the extent that it almost glorifies the violence, replete with a photo section in the middle of the book. Instead, this painstakingly researched account doesn't shy away from the atrocity not in the name of sensationalism but rather in the hopes of offering a true compendium of the tragedy.
For more info on the book, and its author, check out Dave's web site:
http://davecullen.com/
Here's a trailer for the book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_BUR8u8a0Q
The book has already received great reviews, and there's a really good introduction to the book, at Salon.com that also includes links to rave reviews in Time and Newsweek:
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/04/06/cullen/
It's hard to believe it's been ten years since the shootings. When I finished Dave's book I was reminded of our mentor back at CU-Boulder, the writer and teacher Lucia Berlin. In particular I thought of a story from her final collection, Where I Live Now:
"Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. You stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with a globe on the desk. Persia, the Belgian Congo. The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time."
-from "Wait a Minute," by Lucia Berlin
|
| | Posted 4/6/2009 2:29 PM - 45 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
- recommend
  - recs0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
