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On April 20, 1999, two boys left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. Their goal was simple: to blow up their school, Oklahoma City-style, and to leave "a lasting impression on the world." Their bombs failed, but the ensuing shooting defined a new era of school violence-irrevocably branding every subsequent shooting "another Columbine." When we think of Columbine, we think of the Trench Coat Mafia; we think of Cassie Bernall, the girl we thought professed her faith before she was shot; and we think of the boy pulling himself out of a school window-the whole world was watching him. Now, in a riveting piece of journalism nearly ten years in the making, comes the story none of us knew. In this revelatory book, Dave Cullen has delivered a profile of teenage killers that goes to the heart of psychopathology. He lays bare the callous brutality of mastermind Eric Harris and the quavering, suicidal Dylan Klebold, who went to the prom three days earlier and obsessed about love in his journal. The result is an astonishing account of two good students with lots of friends, who were secretly stockpiling a basement cache of weapons, recording their raging hatred, and manipulating every adult who got in their way. They left signs everywhere, described by Cullen with a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of police files, FBI psychologists, and the boys' tapes and diaries, he gives the first complete account of the Columbine tragedy. In the tradition of Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood, Columbine is destined to be a classic. A close-up portrait of violence, a community rendered helpless, and police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers-an unforgettable cautionary tale for our time.

About Dave Cullen

Dave Cullen is the author of Columbine, an indelible portrait of the killers, the victims, and the community that suffered one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. He is a journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, Slate, Salon, New York Daily News, 5280, Denver Post, Pacific News Service and In These Times.

Cullen is considered a leading authority on the Columbine killers, and has also written extensively on Evangelical Christians, gays in the military, politics, and pop culture. A graduate of the MA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Cullen has won several writing awards, including a GLAAD Media Award, Society of Professional Journalism awards, the Jovanovich Imaginative Writing Award, and several Best of Salon citations. He is an Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at Columbia University.

Dave grew up in Chicago, and has worked in most regions of the U.S., as well as England, Kuwait and Bahrain. He worked as a computer systems developer for EDS and a management consultant for Arthur Andersen. He served as a Private and a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He moved to Colorado in1994, and currently lives in Denver.

Dave Cullen's Columbine coverage has been cited by most major media, and featured prominently by columnists Frank Rich and David Brooks in the New York Times, Hanna Rosin in the Washington Post, and the Columbia Journalism Review.

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