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"  Littleton, Colorado. Seemed like an average American suburb. Quiet town on the outskirts of mile-high Denver. Bad things just didn&amp;#039;t happen there. At least until April 20, 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot dead twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School.  Columbine began what might be called the Age of the School Shooter. Of course, school shootings had happened before. (Nobody can forget the 1966 tower tragedy in Austin, Texas.) But the brutal magnitude of the Columbine massacre, the youth of those responsible, and its coolly efficient planning and execution, were unheard of \u2014 and, though nobody could have predicted it at the time, a sign of more to come. In the past ten years, we have witnessed shootings all across the United States: Red Lake, Minnesota. Cazenovia, Wisconsin. Paradise, Pennsylvania. Blacksburg, Virginia. Dover, Delaware. DeKalb, Illinois. Europe has witnessed many more. (Not to mention the 2004 Russian terror attack, let alone what transpired in Binghamton on Friday). Leveraged for political ends by Michael Moore on film and adopted for convenience by the news media as shorthand for teenage violence, Columbine has begun to feel as impenetrable and allegorical as Greek myth. So the intensive reporting of Denver-based journalist Dave Cullen is welcome. His new book, released today in hardcover, tells the real story behind the blue-skied springtime catastrophe in Colorado. And that&amp;#039;s a relief. Because finally dispelled are the prevailing simplifications \u2014 particularly the one about the gruesome loner-turned-killer twosome. You know, those suicidal Trench Coat Mafia dudes who aimed guns at jocks, African Americans, and people wearing hats. The truth is much more complex. In fact, Cullen creates more than a nuanced portrait of school shooters as young men. He writes a human story \u2014 a compassionate narrative of teenagers with guns (and bombs, too), and the havoc they wreak on a school, a community, and America. Sure, you might think you know what happened at Columbine. But you&amp;#039;re probably wrong. Hell, Littleton was my hometown; at the time of the tragedy, I was sitting in a middle-school classroom only a few miles down the road. I was sure I knew what took place. The truth is, I didn&amp;#039;t have a clue. RELATED LINKS: TEN YEARS LATER: Seven Authors Recount April 20, 1999 NIU INVESTIGATION: Portrait of the School Shooter as a Young Man PLUS: C.J. Chivers&amp;#039;s Award-Winning Account of the Beslan School Massacre "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5815/columbine-book-review-040609/>