Columbine

By Dave Cullen
2010
496 pages / 14 hours and 6 minutes
Nonfiction

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Has it really been 20 years? Yes (and a little bit more) since the name of a Colorado high school became part of the American lexicon. It is a testimony to the sad state of affairs that two decades later Parkland has come to occupy a similar place. In 2009, 10 years after the Columbine massacre, journalist Dave Cullen wrote what is the single best book on this incredibly sad story. Recently he has also taken on the Parkland shooting in print.

The Columbine book hasn’t made everybody entirely happy. In fact, a few of the responses are a little on the vicious side. But this is probably as close as we’re likely to get to a true account on what happened and why.

The book does a good bit of de-mythologizing. It turns out we have a lot invested in some of those myths. There was no Trench Coat Mafia. It wasn’t about goths versus jocks or anything of the sort. It wasn’t an attack on Christians. The linchpin of this disaster is a psychopath named Eric Harris. There is always a great desire to do armchair quarterbacking and think about what could have prevented this mayhem. But it is not clear that anything could have prevented Eric Harris from doing great evil. Dylan Klebold comes off as an unhappy, depressed loner who was easily manipulated by Harris and likely wouldn’t have harmed anyone apart from his influence.

The book has been widely admired as good old fashioned reporting. While the events are deeply moving and almost unbearable, Cullen has not set out to toy with our hearts but to tell us what really happened. And much of this is deeply unsettling. For instance, the principal of the school inaccurately described when he knew the shooters were in the school, not because he was lying (he wasn’t) but because he actually had no true memory of this moment. In fact, he had a false memory instead. Part of what that shows is that even eyewitness testimonies are subject to the frailties of perception and memory.

This book is not for the faint of heart, and for parents it will be particularly unsettling. We have learned some things about how to respond to school shootings from the experience of Columbine and subsequent school attacks, but recent history has shown us that there is a limit to the security that we can provide. It is particularly heartrending to see how unaware Klebold’s parents were of what he was going to participate in. His mother has more recently put her own thoughts into writing. It’s heartbreaking.

I’m not sure I can easily say why I think you ought to read this book. It goes well beyond the fact that it is a riveting piece of reportage. It just seems to me that we ought to know what happened. Telling the truth of the event as well as possible might be the best way to honor the young people who died and their grieving parents. Ministers, this is part of the world in which you dare to preach.