Columbine Book Review
Columbine, by Dave Cullen, explains the happenings of the Columbine High School Tragedy of April 20, 1999. This book is unlike the others in its field. Instead of focusing on the happenings of this event, this book tends more to the questions of Why? and What happened after the event? Cullen put extensive effort into researching facts for his book. It took him 10 years to publish his book, and his book is now considered one of the most well informing retellings of the tragedy. One thing Dave particullary excelled at is not believing the media's rumors and interpretations of the events. Instead, he put in a lot of effort and dug deeper to uncover the truth. This helped distinguish his book from other books of the same category. Cullen succeeded at creating a vivid picture of the events. As a student at Columbine High School, this aided in me in being able to pinpoint the locations of events and imagine what exactly was happening in certain scenes. Though this book was an overall great read, it had some flaws. The plot jumped around a lot, leaving large gaps of time but then later in the book returning to that same time period. Sometime even in the same chapter the time period of which the retelling of the events took place would change. At some points, this made the book harder to follow as I had to step back and think Wait, when is this taking place?. Cullen also jumped back and forth between characters a lot which made it hard to remember small details about a character’s story while also trying to pay attention to new details about new characters. Columbine, by Dave Cullen, is a great read and I highly recommend it to mature audiences.