Where were you when ...

... President John F. Kennedy was assasinated (November 22, 1963)?

... Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon (July 21, 1969)?

... the Twin Towers fell in New York City (September 11, 2001)?

... Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas (August 29, 2005)?

Some events are so momentuous - either because of tragedy or triumph - that they remain frozen in our minds forever. While I didn't experience the first event, my mother-in-law did. She remembers - vivdly - watching the news coverage in the sweltering heat of her living room. I wasn't alive when JFK was shot, but my mother recalls getting the news while heading to class at BYU. The last two, however, played out before my eyes on the t.v. screen. I remember the horror, the disbelief, the fear - and that was just from seeing images on the news. At that point, I had visited neither New York City nor New Orleans. I knew no one who lived there. Despite the distance, I grieved for the victims. I'll never forget 9/11 or Katrina.

April 20, 1999 saw a tragedy of another kind. Two high school seniors open-fired on their classmates at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colorado. The news sent my heart straight through the floor. My teenage nieces attended high school in Littleton. Although I'd visited them only 5 months earlier, I couldn't recall the name of their school; I prayed it wasn't Columbine. It wasn't. Still, I remember being glued to the t.v. watching terrified students stream out of the school, an injured boy falling out a window, anchormen/women trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. In the days following the murders, the media ranted about cause: bullies; violent video games and movies; Goth culture; lax gun laws; and inaction by police. Eventually, other news stories captured the nation's attention. Those who, like me, were swept away by other headlines probably remember only a few things about Columbine: teenage killers worn down by constant bullying; a boy falling out a window; a girl martryred for her belief in God; tearful reunions. According to journalist Dave Cullen, we don't know the half of it. In fact, we know even less than we think we know.

Cullen, considered the leading expert on the tragedy, recently published Columbine, a hefty, in-depth look at the event he spent 9 years researching. In it, he writes:

"We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened. No Goths, no outcasts, nobody snapping. No targets, no feud, and no Trench Coat Mafia. Most of those elements existed at Columbine - which is what gave them such currency. They just had nothing to do with the murders" (149).

Cullen's book seeks to set the record straight. With information culled from personal interviews, police reports, journals, video tapes, court records, etc. he leads the reader through the tragedy. He paints the killers in a new light - as intelligent boys who thought, dreamed about and planned "Judgment Day" far in advance. Eric Harris, especially, emerges as a cunning psychopath with a "preposterously grand superiority complex, a revulsion for authority, and an excruciating need for control" (234), who mowed down his peers gleefully, and mostly just to prove that he could. Cullen tracks the police response from initial actions to astonishing cover-ups to lawsuits charging gross mishandling. He talks about the victims - from the controversy surrounding Cassie Bernall's supposed martyrdom to Coach Sanders' undisputed courage to Patrick Ireland's (the boy who pushed himself out the window to safety) painful recovery. Columbine's administrators, faculty, students and their families are also represented - Cullen discusses the fear, the anger, the emotional distress that shook everyone's lives. Exhaustively researched, unflinchingly candid, and absolutely mesmerizing, Columbine offers a riveting look at the nightmare that still haunts so many today.

I

'm going to be honest: I couldn't wait to finish this book. Every time I picked it up, I felt a shiver run down my spine. I'm not sure I've ever read anything so chilling. A couple of years ago, I reviewed Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes (read the review here), a novel about a Columbine-like school shooting. In conclusion, I wrote: "This book scared me to death." That book was fiction. This book is not. I wish it was. Disturbing does not even began to describe Columbine. Still, it's a fascinating, compulsively readable book that will linger in your nightmares long after you've turned the final page. It brings up questions that will churn endlessly in your mind: Could Columbine have been prevented? Do parents ever really know their children? At what point does typical teenage angst turn dangerous? Are some children really born bad? There are no easy answers. Even Cullen can't fully answer the biggest question that sprang out of the Columbine tragedy: Why? He simply presents the evidence - a staggering amount of it - and lets us draw our own conclusions. And what conclusion have I come to? Columbine is unparalleled in its scope, its detail, its research. It's fascinating on every level. But, I've never been more relieved to finish a book. Although some events must be remembered, sometimes all you want to do is forget. Thanks to Columbine by Dave Cullen, I never, ever will.

Grade: A

If this were a movie, it would be rated: R for violence, language and very disturbing content

(Book image from Barnes & Noble)