Wednesday, January 27, 2010

2010 ALA Awards Announced!

In case you missed it, the American Library Association announced their annual slew of awards at its mid-winter meeting in Boston this month. Check out the ALA Award Winners!
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. gmJanuary 30, 2010 at 6:37 PM

    Cullen , who first reported on the story for the online magazine Salon, acknowledges in the book's source notes that thoughts he attributes to Klebold and Harris are conjecture gleaned from the record the pair left behind.

    Jeff Kass takes a more straightforward approach in "Columbine: A True Crime Story," working backward from the events of the fateful day.
    The Denver Post

    Mr. Cullen insists that the killers enjoyed "far more friends than the average adolescent," with Harris in particular being a regular Casanova who "on the ultimate high school scorecard . . . outscored much of the football team." The author's footnotes do not reveal how he knows this; when I asked him about it while preparing this review, Mr. Cullen said he did not necessarily mean to imply that Harris was sexually active. But what else would such words mean?

    "Eric and Dylan never had any girlfriends," the more sober Mr. Kass writes, and were "probably virgins upon death."
    Wall Street Journal

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lauri VaughanJanuary 31, 2010 at 11:45 AM

    Thanks for the Kass title. I will surely take a look.

    I'd read the source note about Cullen's artistic license with the boys' thoughts. I didn't find his interpretation unreasonable and I felt this approach added something to his narrative. It seems to me he attempts, and succeeds, at doing something different than Kass.

    Finally, I don't see how differing guesses at the boys' sexual prowess strengthens or weakens anyone's point of view. What I took away from Cullen's book was that my misperception -- perpetuated by media at the time -- that these kids were bullied and ostracized by their peers was wildly inaccurate. And their killing spree was not targetted at classmates that tortured them.

    I think it amazing that the event that precipitated an increased awareness of such behavior -- a real and disturbing aspect of teen communities -- was not actually caused by it.

    Cullen's broader look at the event in its cultural and historical context is fascinating, and his efforts have rightfully put his title on many Best Books of 2009 lists.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)