The Educated Reporter: Columbine.

The Educated Reporter: Columbine.

Columbine.

by Linda Perlstein

Last night I finished reading Columbine, Dave Cullen’s play-by-play of the 1999 school shooting. It was the most compelling nonfiction book I have read since Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open. (Which was, flat-out, one of my favorite books ever. Props to ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer for near-poetic narrative skills and to Agassi for his introspection, clear memory and willingness to lay it all out there. Also for the storytelling masterstroke of having married Brooke Shields.)

In Columbine, Cullen does a really good job of shifting focus tight and wide and back again, of showing us the crime in progress upfront and then again, from different viewpoints. He is good with character studies, and while I question his frequent use of terms like “brewskis” and “chicks”—I would have to read the killers’ journals; did they really talk like that?—he writes well.

What lingered with me most were the flaws he laid out in two institutions: the press and the police. Law enforcement failed to connect dots before the crime, and covered up their faults afterward. Rules about shielding evidence allowed them to do so, and to what end? As for the press, which printed an awful lot that turned out to