Columbine.

GoodReads Synopsis: 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."

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 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 came to stockpile a basement cache of weapons, to record their raging hatred, and to manipulate 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 boy's tapes and diaries, Cullen gives the first complete account of the Columbine tragedy.

In the tradition of Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood, Columbine is destined to become a classic. A close-up portrait of hatred, a community rendered helpless, and the police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers--an unforgettable cautionary tale for our times.

My Thoughts:  Wow, this was a fascinating book.  It's incredibly well-researched and well-written.  I found myself in places wishing a bit that the author would stop bouncing back and forth between before and after the shooting.  But by the end of the book, it make complete sense how he peeled back the onion bit by bit instead of chronologically.  

I learned so much about the tragedy, mostly that everything I knew about it was untrue.  Columbine was quite damning to the media and its coverage of such tragic events, and how their poor coverage resulted in so much false belief even ten years later (when this book was published).  

If you're curious about Columbine, school shootings/terrorism, or the psychology of people who commit mass murder, then this would be a great read for you.  I read it in less than three days, despite the heaviness of the subject matter.  Incredibly fascinating and incredibly sad, all in the same book.