Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Columbine

Columbine by Dave Cullen

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When I first saw the cover of Dave Cullen’s Columbine, it filled me with dread. The picture of the exterior of the school stretches across the lower part of the cover, while the rest of the image is nothing but a wide expanse of overcast sky. The cover is blank and cold. Some of my reaction is, of course, attributed to knowing what happened at Columbine. But there is something particularly hopeless about the cover image. Columbine is about the 1999 mass school shooting perpetrated […]

Younger generations give me hope.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

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On February 14, 2018, a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Florida. This book is not about that day, it is not a painstaking retelling of the traumas suffered by those who survived and those who did not. It is about what sprung from that day, a movement propelled by hope and grief and a determination that it never happen again. A movement run by kids. Almost immediately in the aftermath of the shooting these kids got together to do…something. […]

A hopeful book about a school shooting.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

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I would have probably gotten around to this eventually, but it was this month’s pick for my IRL book club, and I ended up liking it quite a bit, more for its tone than for the actual book itself. It’s very hopeful. But Columbine was the better book, in my opinion. Not that we have to compare the two, but even just for the amount of time and effort put into that book, the output was that much more impactful, and well put together after […]

Why is this shit still happening all these years later?

Columbine by Dave Cullen

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I’ve been meaning to read this book for forever, but finally I felt like I was in a good enough place that I had the mental bandwidth. In reality, I probably shouldn’t have waited so long. It wasn’t an easy read obviously, it’s just that Cullen is such a good writer that the book was surprisingly readable. It feels a bit gross to say that a book about such a terrible tragedy was a page turner and yet… it really was. I think most people […]

I was misinformed, then I was wrong, and now I’m at a loss over a 20 year old tragedy

Columbine by Dave Cullen

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I started this review on April 15th with the line, “I don’t like the style of this book.” Which was true at the time, and ultimately led me to abandon reading it until a couple weeks ago. One of my favorite podcast discoveries this year has been one called Martyrmade. It’s a history podcast in the style of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, heavily detailed with long episodes. The man who makes Martyrmade, Darryl Cooper, has another podcast (which I do not recommend, by the way), […]

Columbine

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Columbine details the before and after of the shooting at Columbine High School in April, 1999. I found this an interesting read and had a hard time putting it down. While reading, it really made me wonder, could all of this have been prevented?  I know that looking back it is easy to see all the signs that were missed, but there were some things that I feel the police should have taken more seriously, and I think that knew they should have too considering […]



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