Word: cullen
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...April 20, students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold marched into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. and killed 15 people, including themselves. Since then, scores of journalists - and millions of Americans - have tried to make sense of a senseless massacre. No one has done so as thoroughly as Dave Cullen. An investigative journalist, Cullen sped to the scene as the shootings unfolded, and has been reporting the story ever since. In Columbine, released this month, he debunks much of the event's mythology, offers riveting profiles of the two very different killers and chronicles a town's attempts to come...
Read a review of journalist Dave Cullen's new book Columbine...
...first lesson of Columbine is that "they" were not they. To understand Harris and Klebold, you have to learn to tell them apart. Harris was the extrovert: "He smoked, he drank, he dated. He got invited to parties. He got high," Cullen writes. An Army brat, shuttled from school to school, he had picked up the trick of being charming, but he also had a temper that flared when he didn't get his way. Klebold was physically more imposing--at 6 ft. 3 in., he was 6 in. taller--but he was less sure of himself...
Klebold called his journal, more poetically, "Existences: A Virtual Book." It alternates between odes to his lonely misery and pages full of winged hearts, symbols of his love for a girl Cullen calls "Harriet," to whom Klebold apparently never spoke. Whereas Harris dreamed of homicide, Klebold dreamed about suicide: "Thinking of suicide gives me hope that i'll be in my place wherever i go after this life--that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe." Klebold was the follower, not the planner. Under Harris' careful direction, he learned to turn his inner pain inside...
...actual events of April 20, 1999, are exactly as appalling as you'd expect, and Cullen doesn't spare us a second of them. To assemble a definitive timeline of the attack, Cullen has had to resolve hundreds of wildly divergent eyewitness accounts. This was, as he puts it, "the first major hostage standoff of the cell phone age," so as the nightmare unfolded, students were calling local news stations, which then fed their panicked stories back into classrooms via TVs in real time, creating a feedback loop that distorted their experience of the event even as it was happening...