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 […]

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. […]