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No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School
On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, two seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, walked into their school and shot to death twelve students and one teacher, and wounded many others. It was the worst single act of murder at a school in U.S. history.
Few people knew Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris better than Brooks Brown. Brown and Klebold were best friends in grade school, and years later, at Columbine, Brown was privy to some of Harris and Klebold’s darkest fantasies and most troubling revelations After the shootings, Brown was even accused by the police of having been in on the massacre—simply because he had been friends with the killers.
Brown with journalist Rob Merritt tells his full version of the story. He describes the warning signs that were missed or ignored, and the evidence that was kept hidden from the public after the murders. He takes on those who say that rock music or video games caused Klebold and Harris to kill their classmates and explores what it might have been that pushed these two young men, from supposedly stable families, to harbor such violent and apocalyptic dreams.
Shocking as well as inspirational and insightful, No Easy Answers is an authentic wake-up call for all the psychologists, authorities, parents, and law enforcement personnel who have attempted to understand the murders at Columbine High School. As the title suggests, the book offers no easy answers, but instead presents the unvarnished facts about growing up as an alienated teenager in America today.
This edition contains a new afterword that describes what has happened in the United States since Columbine, and provides updates on the aftermath of the massacre.
Few people knew Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris better than Brooks Brown. Brown and Klebold were best friends in grade school, and years later, at Columbine, Brown was privy to some of Harris and Klebold’s darkest fantasies and most troubling revelations After the shootings, Brown was even accused by the police of having been in on the massacre—simply because he had been friends with the killers.
Brown with journalist Rob Merritt tells his full version of the story. He describes the warning signs that were missed or ignored, and the evidence that was kept hidden from the public after the murders. He takes on those who say that rock music or video games caused Klebold and Harris to kill their classmates and explores what it might have been that pushed these two young men, from supposedly stable families, to harbor such violent and apocalyptic dreams.
Shocking as well as inspirational and insightful, No Easy Answers is an authentic wake-up call for all the psychologists, authorities, parents, and law enforcement personnel who have attempted to understand the murders at Columbine High School. As the title suggests, the book offers no easy answers, but instead presents the unvarnished facts about growing up as an alienated teenager in America today.
This edition contains a new afterword that describes what has happened in the United States since Columbine, and provides updates on the aftermath of the massacre.
Kindle Edition
Published May 30, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 3, 2022
I was the publisher of this book when it first came out in 2002, and worked on this most recent version. I thought I'd say a few words about it—especially given the shootings at Uvalde and Buffalo that happened at the same time as the publication of the anniversary edition. The book, which was written by the authors when they were in their early twenties, retains the bravado and anger of young men. It's also exceptionally well-written: a fast-paced, thorough, honest, and damning indictment of failures of leadership at a high school, and failures of policing before, during, and after the event (as we've seen again with Uvalde). The new introduction updates the horrific figures around school shootings, but the authors don't want to concentrate on guns so much as the toxic culture of bullying, alienation, and the complacency and negligence of the adult authorities. NO EASY ANSWERS remains all-too-relevant in all-too-many situations today.
November 10, 2023
Very sad but definitely written well.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews