Columbine Excerpts
Columbine: Main book
We made three Columbine excerpts available, at Oprah.com and Slate:
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Chapter 1: "Mr. D."
Eric starts building bombs: "God I Want to Torch and Level Everything."
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Struggling to save Dave Sanders: "Inside Columbine."
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And for the first time, I'm now sharing a few excerpts from the epilogue (below.)
To simplify things, I scanned the first brief chapter for you here. I think it may surprise you. This is an intense story, leavened by surprising moments of love and redemption. Here's how I began it:
Columbine Epilogue (2016)
This blight I have dubbed spectacle murders has gone on far too long. We are not powerless. I created an expanded edition of Columbine in 2016, with 30 pages of new material (50 since the original hardcover and ebook), including a new epilogue putting this tragedy in context and discussion solutions. More on that below. But I began on a personal note:
The heart of the epilogue is about understanding this new ghastly template Eric and Dylan created for mass murders, and what we can do about it. I focus on two key factors:
1) Teen depression, the great unlearned lesson of Columbine, and
2) The media's role in providing the platform. Here is a passage from the opening of that section:
Also see my Teen Depression 101, and my BuzzFeed piece on depriving future killers recognition. In BuzzFee I addressed drastically curtailing use of killers' names, which I consider an obvious first step. The new epilogue goes much deeper.
Click to my Columbine page for more on the book and other school shootings and mass murder.
More on my gay soldiers book.