Tag: Dave Cullen

Randy Brown on the cancellation of today’s Columbine-related Oprah broadcast

Westword
Michael Roberts 
April 20, 2009 

Kate Battan, Dave Cullen and Dwayne Fuselier on a Columbine-related episode of “Oprah” that will no longer air today. (for the 10 year anniversary)

As pointed out earlier today in a blog about the many media appearances of Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis, Colorado journalist Dave Cullen, author of the widely praised volume Columbine, was scheduled to appear on Oprah today, the tenth anniversary of the massacre at the high school. However, yesterday afternoon, Cullen sent out a note to folks on his e-mail list revealing that the program wouldn’t run due to “a production decision.” This choice was confirmed earlier today on the Oprah website. A note from host Oprah Winfrey reads: “I decided to pull the Columbine show today. After reviewing it, I thought it focused too much on the killers. Today, hold a thought for the Columbine community. This is a hard day for them.”

The Winfrey comment suggests that there’s more to the story – and there is. Randy Brown, father of Brooks Brown, a friend of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who has worked indefatigably over the past ten years to make information about the killings public, says that he was among several members of the Columbine community, including relatives of victims he declines to name, who contacted producers to express concerns about the show, which was heavily promoted in recent days on Channel 4, Oprah’s broadcast home in Denver. Brown and company were especially distressed by the presence as guests of Kate Battan, Jefferson County’s chief Columbine investigator, whom Brown believes was part of an information cover-up, as well as Dwayne Fuselier, an FBI profiler whose son was a Columbine student who made a parody video depicting the destruction of the school two years before the assault.

Brown, who has appeared on Oprah in the past, doesn’t denigrate Winfrey for moving forward with this particular lineup. Instead, he praises her profusely for taking to heart complaints from families. “I think it’s an incredible sign of Oprah’s humanity and understanding that she would listen to these people and do something about it – not air the show out of respect for them,” he says. “That’s a really good thing.”

A spokesperson for Oprah doesn’t make the same cause-and-effect connection between the complaints and the change in the content of today’s show, which now features a segment about a mother released from prison. The spokesperson says family members voiced objections prior to the taping, and the decision not to air the Columbine program was Winfrey’s alone.

Whatever the case, Brown is clearly no fan of Cullen’s book. He posted a one-star review of the tome on the Amazon.com website in which he states, “This book is not the true story of Columbine.”

“The biggest problem I have with Cullen’s book is his conclusion that Eric is a psychopath,” Brown adds. “Whether that’s true or not, Dylan wasn’t a psychopath – and these children had motivation for what they did. As misguided and ridiculous as their response was, they had a motivation: bullying at the school, and the atmosphere there. You can’t bully and humiliate people without them having a response to it. Now, in this case, that response was ridiculous and violent and wrong. But to just say they’re psychopaths is so easy. People don’t have to think anymore. They don’t have to worry. They can say, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’ But that’s not true. You can do something. You can stop bullying and harrassment in schools and in the workplace.”

That Cullen would be joined on Oprah by Battan, who some Columbine families despise, and Fuselier, a man with what Brown considers to be a major conflict of interest on the Columbine story, only raised more red flags, Brown says. And he has just as many negative remarks to offer about DeAngelis, who appeared on the taping of the show last Wednesday via Skype. “He’s making his attempt to rewrite his place in the Columbine tragedy,” Brown argues. “And he’s very good at it.”

Such thoughts were shared in e-mails sent to the Oprah production office, Brown notes, “and a senior producer responded to – well, it’s an understatement to say ‘misgivings.’ More like anger at having Battan and Fuselier and Cullen on that show. And the people at Oprah listened to them and responded accordingly out of respect for the families.”

The eleventh-hour plug-pulling is a huge blow to Cullen, who declined to comment for this item. After all, author appearances on Oprah have provided larger book-sale boosts than any other promotion or forum in recent years. But Brown isn’t shedding any tears on the author’s behalf. Instead, he lauds Winfrey. “Television shows are big productions, and there’s a lot of work that goes into that show,” he says. “It had to be a difficult decision for Oprah. And I certainly think she made the right one.”

[Source]

Author Jeff Kass on how his Columbine theories differ from Dave Cullen’s

Westword
By Michael Roberts 
May 7, 2009

Local author Dave Cullen’s book Columbine has received an enormous amount of media attention – far more than another recently published tome, Columbine: A True Crime Story. And Jeff Kass, the ex-Rocky Mountain News reporter who penned the latter, has definitely noticed the discrepancy. He’s not surprised that the national press gravitated toward Cullen’s offering, which was issued by Twelve Books, a growing publishing powerhouse. (In contrast, Kass’ effort comes courtesy of Ghost Road Press, a modest, Denver-based outfit.) But he’s more bothered by inattention from local outlets. For instance, although Colorado Public Radio aired an enormous number of Columbine-related reports around April 20, the tenth anniversary of the attack on the high school, he notes that “they never interviewed me, and as far as I know, never mentioned by book.”

Adding to his frustration is the willingness of so many reviewers and observers to accept Cullen’s conclusions as definitive. In Kass’ view, “Columbine is a major social issues, and it deserves a lot of books to be written about it – a lot of serious books.” Moreover, he says, “I have issues with some of the things he says in his book. I just don’t find the attribution for a lot of it. There’s room for contradictory and conflicting opinions as long as they’re backed up by facts – and I feel I’m able to back up everything in my book.”

Of course, the authors agree on plenty of things, including the relative unimportance of bullying as a motivator for the killing spree launched by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold – a major bone onetime Columbine parent and activist Randy Brown has to pick with Cullen. Kass bases his beliefs in this area on diaries kept by the murderers. “They write about everything from losing their Zippo lighter to not being able to get a date,” he points out. “But they barely talk about bullying, period, and they never talk about being bullied themselves. And you’d think they would have if it had been such a factor for them.”

Likewise, Kass concurs with Cullen about Klebold’s depressive tendencies. But he’s not as willing to suggest that Klebold merely followed Harris’ orders. “Dylan’s writings show him to be pretty entranced by the plan. And their code word for the shootings – NBK, which stood for Natural Born Killers, one of their favorite movies – came from him. He was the first to mention doing an NBK, going NBK. That says to me that he wasn’t such a secondary participant.”

Kass and Cullen also have slightly different takes on Harris. Both argue that he was probably a psychopath – although Kass acknowledges some evidence to the contrary. “The trademark of a psychopath is that you have no emotion, no feelings. And in Eric’s diaries, he does have emotion. For one thing, he worries about what’s going to happen to his parents, and he feels bad about not being able to bond with his father more. And he feels devastated that he has no friends and that people ignore him and he can’t get dates.”

This last point is a key one from Kass’ perspective. “He says Eric Harris was this wildly popular student, especially with the girls – that he’s dating or having sex with all these girls at school. And I totally disagree with that. I don’t find any attribution in his book or in the end notes for that. I don’t know where it comes from. I’d like to know. And he says similar things about Dylan. He says Dylan had all these friends, and that he was well-connected at school and at least was more popular than we thought he was. And I don’t know where he comes up with that, either.”

"Now, maybe you can find a study showing that if you have five close friends, you’re a normal high school student in America,” he goes on. “But even if you could prove that Dylan had five close friends, that doesn’t mean he was a normal high school student, because Dylan didn’t believe that himself. Dylan was blinded to friends by his depression, and Eric was blinded to any friends he had by his rage. So I think you’re in this academic situation. You could say, ‘Gee, Eric and Dylan, you had a lot of friends, and you lived these great middle-class lives.’ But that didn’t get through to them. They thought their lives were miserable. So it’s a classic case of perception versus reality.”

As for Kass’ perceptions, he says, “I think both Eric and Dylan died virgins. And even though it’s sort of a weird topic to get into – their sex lives – I really think it’s illustrative of how well-connected, or not connected, they were to the school community. I feel they were outcasts. I feel they were among the most unpopular kids in the school – and my evidence is their diaries. Pick up almost any page and all they talk about is how much they are outcasts, how they don’t feel part of the school or any community.”

More distinctions between the books crop up in terms of the topics the authors tackle. Cullen focuses almost entirely on the crime itself, whereas Kass devotes his epilogue to what he describes as “the cover-up” conducted by Jefferson County law-enforcement officials. He also attempts to find links between Columbine and other school shootings around the country, and his research leads him to conclude that the vast majority take place in suburban communities in the southern and western parts of the United States. He’s also come up with a theory to explain the regional nature of the phenomenon.

“I found studies done before Columbine and with, from what I could tell, no notion of school shootings in mind that talked about the culture of honor,” he says. “It’s a well-known concept in the South, but also in the West, where, if you feel your honor has been violated, you feel the need to retaliate to defend it – and you feel that it’s okay to do that with violence. That’s seen as an acceptable means of avenging your lost honor.”

For Kass, getting this information out to the broader public remains important – and even though Columbine’s tenth anniversary has passed (with Cullen grabbing the vast majority of spotlight time), he hasn’t given up on reaching readers. He’s hoping to arrange a book tour to other places that have suffered through mass shootings at schools, such as Jonesboro, Arkansas, Blacksburg, Virginia and West Paducah, Kentucky.

“I think there’s still a window of opportunity to promote the book, and really, it’s always going to have relevance,” he says. “Even if all of this was to stop tomorrow, people would still want to know about what happened and why.”

[Source]

[Jeff Kass]

Randy Brown trashes Cullen

by randybrown on March 22nd, 2009, 12:00 pm #722168

Article Discussion: Greene: Backward, forward on Columbine  
[Article is under the cut]

To a Columbine insider this book is full of errors and speculation. It is as if a complete outsider decided to do a book on Columbine, with a few notes and very little research. I was very upset at the number of glaring errors and the total lack of research. But, it is the pure speculation and the imagined responses and emotions he ascribes to Eric Harris that I find so disturbing. They are absurd.

Unknowing people will read this book and accept it as fact, and they will be sorely mistaken. The psychological profile reached in the book is based on so little information it should be an embarrassment to the investigator.

This book is a joke to anyone who knows many of the truths about Columbine. A joke. A sad, full of misinformation, joke.

The final verdict, according to the book, is that Eric and Dylan were not bullied. I guess the writer has never heard of the Regina Huerter Report, or read the many accounts of bullying from students.

Oh well, let’s just rewrite history. It is much easier than telling the truth, and much less painful. If Eric was crazy, as the book contends, no more questions need to be asked. If he was not crazy, and his reactions were a response to the bullying and resulting hyper-vigilance, then we need to change ourselves. Crazy as an analysis is so much easier.

I hate this book. If you read it,remember that it is a fictional account of Columbine. Learn your lessons accordingly.

Randy Brown

A Columbine Parent.

—

Article Discussion: Greene: Backward, forward on Columbine
Postby randybrown on March 26th, 2009, 2:39 pm #729873

The author has a responsibility.

I have just read the book by Dave Cullen on Columbine. I was angry at first, and then just disappointed.

I read it knowing that this was not a novel, not fictional, but a story about a real tragedy, with real people involved. I read it knowing that the story is so complicated that some errors are expected. I read it with the expectation of imperfection, but with the assumption that the author would research his story, and try to get as close to the truth as possible.

What I have found is just the opposite. The author relied on two main sources for his book, a police officer from Jefferson County and the lead FBI Agent for the investigation. Both are not reliable sources without some corresponding research into the other facts that exist, and they both certainly have a biased agenda.

The police officer and the FBI Investigator both have slanted agendas, biased by the Law Officers point of view, and both should have been kept out of any objective story about Columbine. At the very least they should have been interviewed, and their interviews weighted with the real facts as they were revealed years later. I am not saying they are dishonest, just that they have such specific agendas that the story shouldn’t rely on their input for its soul.

Unfortunately, it does.

The bullying, which is such a large part of Columbine, is dismissed by the FBI agent and the author, and that glaring omission changes the story of Columbine to a work of fiction. So many students from the school have told us about the bullying, and so many interviews by the police during the tragedy mention the bullying that it is inconceivable to me that this was left out of the book and dismissed in its entirety. There is actually a report made during the Governor’s investigation with Chief Justice Erickson that mentions and explains the bullying, from the constant fear to the persecution of a Jewish student by the school athletes. Perhaps the author should have read the Regina Huerter Report. To leave this major part of the tragedy out of the story is to rewrite history.
That is what this book is, a revisionist version of the Columbine Tragedy, which leads the reader to believe so many falsehoods that, upon completion of the book, I even questioned all of the things I know to be facts. I even questioned my knowledge of Columbine, and I lived it. In fact, I not only lived it, I researched it for years. This book, and the stories in it, will change the way people look at Columbine, and it will forever confuse researchers and lead them down false paths that are not the real truth.

Yes, I know that some truths can be perceptions, and can be discussed by experts for many years. I understand that some theories are going to vary about the two killers, and about the way Columbine is perceived.
As an example, the failure of the police to go into the school for hours is seen by many as cowardice. It is the glaring example of the failure of the police to protect children and citizens, and the failures at Columbine led to drastic and serious changes to first responder methods. That is basically a truth. But, the book makes light of this failure and doesn’t clearly show the terror and the abandonment of the children left alive in the library that were rescued many hours later. The name Lisa Kreutz is barely a footnote, and she is the best example of the failure of the Sheriff’s department. Ignored are the wounded children who may have died while waiting for the police. Ignored is the complete absolvement of the SWAT team by the D.A. before the ballistics report was returned from the CBI, a most questionable and suspicious situation.
In addition to the failure to police mistakes, is the absurd way he gives the two killers emotional responses and feelings of regret when no evidence exists to support this. It is akin to a WW2 reporter saying that the Nazis were sorry and that they didn’t really mean it. Really?

As a Columbine parent, I find this book repulsive, for the main reason that it rewrites the Columbine tragedy. The author doesn’t owe me anything, even though I was interviewed for the book. The author owes the public an attempt to tell the true story about Columbine, not an agenda influenced version based on the stories of two policemen and some incomplete research. I am disgusted, discouraged, and disappointed, and sorry that this book fails the people of Columbine in so many ways. I am mostly sad that some reader will read it in 3 years or 25 years, and think that this is the truth. They will be very wrong.

The people who lived through Columbine know parts of the truth. Everyone knows a different story, and every story is painful and sad. It is better not to tell the story of Columbine if the truth about bullying, the environment at the school, and the causes for the murders are diminished by pseudo-experts who use the tragedy to further their own career or to rewrite history to make the police look good.

Anyone who watched the police response at Columbine for hours, and saw staging but no activity, knows the truth about the police response. It is described in one word: Failure. In fact, the police failed us before, during and after Columbine. In their defense, the new first-responder policies are a direct result of brave policemen watching the failure at Columbine and correcting the problem with new policies designed for a quick, direct and effective response to a school shooter situation.

But, the biggest problem I have with the book is the easy summary that the author and his expert arrive at: There was no bullying, Eric was just crazy. That is so easy it is banal. That is so easy and so convenient.
If one of the killers was crazy, then we can all relax. It is beyond our power to change it. It is an act of God, and craziness stands as the panacea for all of the worried parents.

“Crazy” means that we do not need to acknowledge our part in this tragedy. We do not need to acknowledge our violent world, the environment of bullying and humiliation in the school, the alienation, the loneliness, the depression, the failures of the psychologists and counselors before Columbine and the pain. We do not have to change. We do not have to try to stop the next school shooting, because you can’t stop “crazy.”

Crazy is easy. Self-analysis and acknowledging our failures is very difficult and very painful. How will we ever learn from this, and stop the next school shooter, if crazy is the final analysis? That is the source of my disgust. This is a revisionist story about Columbine that does not acknowledge the many truths about the Columbine tragedy, which actually dismisses the real cause of the tragedy, in print for the parents, principals, psychologists, counselors, and others to read. This Columbine story, told by an outsider without the complicated and multiple causative factors explained, leaves the reader with a misconception that will last forever.

It was a real tragedy. If the author can"t tell the truth, he should have written a fictional novel.

Randy Brown

A Columbine Parent

By the way… The latest on Randy Brown’s book is that he is self-publishing and will make it available online.  No date yet as to the title or release date.  Probably will be a self-publish sold on Amazon.  Since I am in complete agreement with Randy on the bullying factor to Columbine, I personally cannot wait to read it! 🙂 
—

Here is the entire Denver Post forum discussion.

Another Columbine Parent that goes by AVSgirl (unknown who their identity is) also adds their disgusted reaction to Dave Cullen’s book too. The publisher of Jeff Kass’ book also expounds on the reasons why “Columbine: A True Crime Story is the better read. ( Jeff Kass’ and Cullen’s book both came out in 2009).  

The article referenced by the Denver Post forum which Randy responded about is under the cut : 

Greene: Backward, forward on Columbine

By SUSAN GREENE   [Source]

The Denver PostMarch 21, 2009 at 1:35 pm

You can forget a lot in 10 years.

Like most reporters who covered Columbine, I was content to let much about the massacre slip from memory.

Such as bickering over the crosses at Clement Park. The human chain shielding students from journalists. And the debate over whether victim Cassie Bernall really died for God.

So it was with some hesitation that I picked up “Columbine” by Denver author Dave Cullen, touted as “the first complete account of an American tragedy.” And it was with some surprise that he managed to hook me in his first pages.

The book took 10 years of research, financial struggles and self-doubt for Cullen, a former Arthur Andersen consultant who as a closeted high- schooler was the target of homeroom spitballs. I’m happy to report that he hit it out of the ballpark.

In April 1999, he writes, “Littleton was observed beyond all recognition.”

Jefferson County instantly became a symbol of godlessness, bullying and all that’s wrong with Goth culture, video games, school safety, suburbia and the demise of families in general. Not to mention Abercrombie & Fitch.

“Columbine came to embody everything noxious about adolescence in America,” he writes.

Cullen goes on to set the record straight by chronicling the lives of victims, educators and law enforcers through years of investigations, legal maneuvering, and recovery.

He takes us to college and even the wedding of Patrick Ireland, the junior who saved himself by flopping out the library window live on national TV.

He walks us through years of depression haunting outwardly peppy principal Frank DeAngelis, including the demise of his marriage.

Cullen takes to task local evangelicals for exploiting the massacre with the folk tale that Bernall was shot for her Christianity. In one of the trickiest tightrope walks I’ve seen by a writer, he debunks the martyr myth while still dignifying the need for Bernall’s religious family to find meaning in her death.

Cullen shows the failure to protect the public from Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both long known by Jefferson County to be violent and criminal. Then he shows, step by tax-funded step, how officials lied about that knowledge. If you lacked respect for Sheriff John Stone before reading the book, you’ll now want an indictment.

Cullen’s finest work is his portrayal of two killers he came to understand as well as if he had carpooled with them to bowling class or tossed pizzas with them at Blackjack’s.

He explains Harris not through the lens of normal teenage mental illness but as a psychopath consumed with contempt for everything from the WB Network to all of us idiots sucking up air on a planet he considered fit only for himself.

“For Eric, Columbine was performance. Homicidal art,” he writes.

Cullen’s read on Klebold in some ways is simpler — as a kid who was deeply lonely and pining for love. But it grew complicated when, over years studying his journals and videotapes, Cullen told me he “absorbed a lot of Dylan and his pain.”

“There were times I got depressed and found myself sympathizing with him,” he admits.

Before you conclude that Cullen’s a nutcase, do read his book. For empathizing with a killer isn’t the same as defending him. Rather, it’s such insight and sensitivity that make his work powerful.

If Columbine was analyzed beyond all recognition in 1999, it has taken a decade finally to hold a mirror to the wounds that still fester there. It turns out that some scabs in fact do need to be picked, but only with Cullen’s brand of honesty, meticulousness and care.

Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.greene@denverpost.com.

Dave Cullen is Dead Wrong

I’m not particularly a huge fan of Ralph Larkin’s book “Comprehending Columbine’ as he had some flaws in his own book but they were relatively minor. But he didn’t pull stuff out of his ass like Cullen. He makes many salient points about multiple flaws with Cullen’s book in the article below:

Dave Cullen is Dead Wrong

Posted on April 21, 2009 by templepress

Ralph W. Larkin, author of Comprehending Columbine, responds to Dave Cullen’s new book, Columbine

Dave Cullen’s book, Columbine, has been receiving a great deal of media coverage. For the most part, reviewers are accepting his explanations of the causes of the Columbine shootings as rooted in the psychopathology of the two shooters. The book contains numerous problems, the first of which is that Mr. Cullen goes well beyond the facts of the case to produce an almost novelistic approach to the shootings. He gives Eric Harris a sex life that that has no verification; he gives them emotions that are impossible to know; he attributes sophisticated knowledge of architecture to the two shooters in the placement of the bombs for which there is no evidence. Worst of all, he ignores an existing trail of evidence of rampant bullying at Columbine High School, eyewitness evidence of public humiliations of Klebold and Harris by members of the football team, and statements of the boys both before and during the assault of their intentions to target the so-called jocks. Their videotapes and their writings were obsessed with gaining retribution against jocks. Instead, Cullen, who was heavily influenced by FBI profiler Dwayne Fusilier, labeled Harris a “psychopath,” and Klebold “a depressive,” and attributed the shootings to their mental disorders. This is psychological reductionism at its worst, not to mention the fact that victims of bullies often experience depression.

People unfamiliar with the details of the Columbine massacre focus on the randomness of the shootings and Eric Harris’s rants on the Trenchcoat Mafia website that he created, suggesting that he hated everybody equally as evidence that the shootings were not about jocks or bullying. This is a mistake. First, the boys’ motives were complex. That they wanted to kill jocks is incontrovertibly true. They placed the bombs in the cafeteria not because their location would bring down the ceiling, as stated by Dave Cullen, but because they placed the bombs underneath the table where the jocks always sat. The fact that the bombs did not go off saved a large portion of the football team. Second, as local and FBI investigators pointed out, one reason for carrying out the massacre was to become media celebrities and, as Eric Harris said in the basement tapes, to “kickstart a revolution” of oppressed students like himself. Third, the boys were heavily influenced by paramilitary and gun cultures, which stress dying in a blaze of glory, which they certainly seem to have done. Fourth, and ignored by many investigators, was the fact that Klebold and Harris also hated evangelical Christian students attending Columbine High School who constituted themselves as a moral elite and who went around telling outcast students that if they did not change their ways, accept Jesus as their Savior, and become born again, they would burn in hell.

Jocks and evangelical Christians were their particular hatreds. However, they hated the whole system of social relations at Columbine High School in which they were despised, defined as lesser humans, and subjected to predatory actions. The attitude of a large portion of Columbine students was that because they dressed differently, did not have sufficient school spirit, and acted differently than their peers, they deserved what they received at the hands of the jocks, who regarded themselves as the defenders of the hypermasculine norms of the school.

[Source]

Dave Cullen is Dead Wrong

I read a report that said, “Harris, who conceived the attacks, was more than just disturbed. He was, psychologists now say, a cold-blooded predator psychopath-a smart and charming liar with” a ridiculously large complex of Superiority, repulsion for authority, and a great need for control, “as Cullen wrote. Is this really correct?

Is Cullen correct about Harris?  The answer is no, he is not correct.  

Cullen is pretty much never correct about Eric or either of the boys for that matter. Cullen is not even a professional psych and his armchair psychology of Eric is abysmally simplistic. He authored a book that he largely never interviewed friends and acquaintances that actually knew Eric. A few students from Columbine read Cullen’s book when it came out in 2009 and even said it was flawed, including Brooks Brown, a student who was pretty good friends with the shooters said “A great deal of misinformation – I responded to the top post in length, but the short version is that Cullen claims I didn’t experience what I (and tons of other students at that school) experienced. He’s going against medical records, police reports, FBI findings and more. So…take it with a grain of salt?”

as well as Anne Marie Hochhalter who suffered permanent injuries from the massacre and is wheelchair bound.  She said in this article:  “I was injured at Columbine, and Dave Cullen’s book is inaccurate and sensationalized.”

Basically, the rule of thumb here is that Cullen has a really off target theory about Eric and also the dynamic between Eric and Dylan. That is the biggest problem with his book and given that Columbine is all about these two boys, it’s quite problematic.  It’s like the Elephant in the room when you try to read the book.  A lot of his book is just him winging his theories and generating misinformation in a almost propaganda-like fashion for the masses. You get the strong impression that Cullen has a massive ego and wants to be The End-all-Be-All Go To authority on Columbine an expects everyone to just buy his word as the definitive end-of-story answer to why Columbine happened. The book basically reads like fictionalized fact. Another major problem with Cullen’s ‘take’ is that he downplays bullying as playing a significant motivating role in the Columbine massacre.  

 I would encourage you to start exploring the Dave Cullen tag of E-C to catch yourself up on how, very off the mark Cullen.

I would also encourage you to check out some of my book recs with authors that give a very accurate take on the boys and the massacre.  Brooks Brown’s book is a high recommendation as he knew Eric first hand.

I’m not ignorant therefore I can recognize Dave Cullen is, but is his book “Columbine” still worth reading even if it’s to understand some of the wrong perspectives.

Sure, I’ll agree with you on that.  Any book can be worth reading to obtain perspective even if you don’t particularly agree with much of it. There were a few things in Cullen’s book I liked amongst all of it’s tripe. I mention the good, the bad and the ugly of “Columbine” here.

Opinion on “Columbine” by Dave Cullen?

To give some fair con-crit to this, I’ll start off by saying that I liked the initial setup of the book. I do give kudos to Cullen for painting a really vivid picture of describing what unincorporated Jefferson County is like: the “old” and “new” parts of homogenized suburbia in Littleton. The flavor of the overall culture and specifics sorts of people that live in the community. I felt like I was almost ‘there’ the way he went into descriptive, visual detail. However, once he began to discuss the boys, I was internally having red flags pop up with a ‘huh..what?’ in my mind. This is generally what happens with most people that actually know the case that begin reading this book. It’s Dave Cullen’s “It took me 10 years to write this book” Tour de Force story. Cullen essentially wrote his own interpretational spin of how he sees Eric and Dylan and a goodly portion of it does not mesh with the facts and with people that knew them. Brooks Brown and Chad Laughlin knew Eric and Dylan well and both were pretty much disgusted with the book.

The gimmick of Cullen’s book was designed with the express interest of elevating himself as the definitive myth dispelling source of what actually happened versus what we were spoonfed up to the present day (2009) by media. This way he could launch and market it with the egotistical authority of ‘Hey, folks, ignore everything else you read before because my book is the only No. 1 go-to-source for the “Truth” about Columbine!’ His essential

foundational tactic, of a few, was to say that ‘bullying was not a motive’ and from there, he veered from the actual media interviews and accounts given in the 11k, and began putting his own fictionalized, skewed spin on things to make it fit his tenets. He was known to have not interviewed sources either and just filled in the blanks without consulting with witnesses. Cullen then stamped ‘psychopath’ on the forehead of Eric Harris and ‘depressed follower’ on sidekick, Dylan Klebold, with a cocksure arrogance sum-it-up of ‘hey, people: don’t bother spending anymore time on figuring out why because one kid was simply born to become pathologically evil and the other was

predispositioned

to jump off a cliff when said psycho led him to. Yes, sheep, don’t spend anymore time analyzing the boys because Dave wants us to look no further than his dumbed down, arm chair psychology conclusion.

I also felt a bit jerked around with the disjointed, foreward / backward in time way the story unfolded but I think Cullen was simply trying to be ~artistic~ with the vision of his story telling. 😉 The multitude of reasons of why I disliked Dave Cullen’s Columbine are very concisely referenced here and here.   Also, a phenomenal chapter-by-chapter readers review of the scant few pros but many cons of this book can be found here.