Wow! Do I feel stupid. Ten years after the killings at Columbine and I didn’t have a clue about what went on that terrible day until I read this book. Dave Cullen painstakingly researched and expertly crafted this compelling story of two teens, one a psychopath the other suicidal, who opened fire on their friends and neighbors, killing thirteen. The story shocked a nation and forever changed how we perceived school shooters. Unfortunately, the story was wrong.  Dave Cullen presents the facts you may not have heard, and worse for Americans, those that were there all along but we chose to ignore.

Goths? No. Trench Coat Mafia? No. Loners? Losers? Outsiders? No, no, no. These boys were smart and popular, but determined to end their lives in front of the national media in the most horrific way possible. They planted four large explosives, consisting of gasoline jugs and two propane tanks each. Two they cavalierly planted in the middle of the cafeteria, against the support columns, timed to explode during the busiest rush of the day. Two others they left in their cars in the parking lot to kill any emergency responders and survivors who would have assembled there. A fifth explosive was set in a field timed to lure police away from the high school and delay their response.  All five bombs fizzled! Only the one in the field ignited at all, but it caused only a small brush fire and actually served to ready police in the key moments before the 911 calls started coming in.

Cullen also details a sheriff’s office that hid the facts and delayed the release of key evidence and reports. And the media who opted to write their own story in the absence of the truth. Dave Cullen shows that in addition to the tragedy of fifteen deaths that day, is the tragedy of how readily the public accepted the archetypical explanation of what happened.

I found this read to be fair and sympathetic to those who were affected by the killings and those who were powerless to prevent it. Even the infamous Sheriff John Stone is balanced by the expertise and professionalism of Agent Dwayne Fuselier. Each page kept me hungering for more and the writing was vivid and approachable. I highly recommend it!!

I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

I did a lot of reading over the summer and burned through a lot of money on new books. At one point, I read three novels in about a week and a half and then had to force myself to slow down the pace with a couple non-fiction books. Not that reading a a novel every three days is a particularly fantastical feat. I remember reading Shane in one sitting for a school assignment when I was in about the fifth grade.

I have a friend whose wife is a competetive speed reader. These aren’t body-sanctioned contests, mind you, but a competitve habit of finding out what book a person is reading, getting it, and having it finished for the next time she sees them. I don’t think she’d be impressed by three books in ten days, either. But, for me it was pretty above average. I usually don’t make time to read and never read before sleep.

I also hold on to books. When I finish a hard-cover, I remove the dust jacket and toss it before retiring the book to a shelf. Sometimes I debate whether I shouldn’t have held on to the dust covers because they protect the book and help it retain its value. Or so I’ve heard. I just liked the way a natural hard-cover looked, so I started doing it one day and habits can be hard to break. Whenever I think of breaking this one, I remember all the covers of great books I tossed and talk myself out of dishonoring that sacrifice by saving the cover of something I read in half a week during lunch and bathroom breaks.

For me, books add up pretty quickly and take up a lot of space in an already cluttered living room. If I had a library, made of mahogany and with a fireplace, leather chairs and a wet bar with scotch in a crystal decanter no less, I’d happily tuck my past reads into it for future McMahon generations. But, I don’t. Instead, my books are stacked, stuffed, and piled onto a book case in our livingroom. Fortunately, there’s a solution that satisfies my problem of having too many books and also quenches my thirst for the written word.

Bookmooch.com is a book sharing community where members accrue credits from sharing books with other members. The credits are then used to get other books. Each book you give earns you a credit and every book you receive costs you a credit. It’s basically a book-for-book system, although you can earn additional credits for shipping to a foreign country and adding books to your list. When I ran a BBS, we used the same concept for sharing software: a game was a game, it didn’t matter if it was a 3-level version of Tank, it was still worth the same as the latest release. Sometimes to promote uploads, I’d give some people 2-for-1 credits on the latest releases. Bookmooch.com handles their credits well and keeps a user from stacking the deck by capping the send-to-receive ratio at 1:5 which is fair and still encourages good use.

The list of available titles is exhaustive and there are lots of quality books that would still retail very high. I’m going to go through my bookshelf tonight and post all the books I wouldn’t mind going. Not that I didn’t enjoy reading them, but there aren’t a lot of books that I read multiple times and only certain collections that I want to preserve and hand down. I’ll have to check with Maggie and see which James Patterson books can go and which she hasn’t read yet. Some of them Patterson just gave up naming and just started numbering. I think Maggie made it up to 4. She also has a bunch of Sue Grafton’s; Grafton lettered hers. If you see me on Bookmooch.com, pick out a book. Just don’t expect a dust jacket.

http://bookmooch.com/

In all likelihood, even if I had the roughly $36,000 for the full year’s tuition, I’d never be accepted to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  In operation for over 140 years, MIT ranks among the nation’s best and caters to some of the brightest, accepting only about thirteen percent of applicants.  The institute has been home to thirty-one winners of the National Medal of Science and sixty-two Nobel prize recipients, seven of which are members of the current faculty.  The faculty and staff also include six Fulbright Scholars, eighty Guggenheim Fellows, twenty MacArthur Fellows, and four winners of the Kyoto prize.  To say that the MIT faculty excel in science and technology is a bit of an understatement.  So, when I read that MIT has been offering its course materials for free, I took notice.

MIT Open Courseware is an ambitious project which aims to “provide free, searchable access to MIT’s course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.” Currently, the site offers over 1,550 different courses in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Literature, History, Foreign Languages, Computer Sciences, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautics, Architecture, and the rest of MIT’s thirty-four departments.  The list is as extensive as it is impressive.  Each course offers syllabi, lectures, readings, assignments, discussions, exams, and miscellaneous other materials available online or for download in a single ZIP file.  The project started in 1999 and is expected to be completed, but continually updated, by next year.  When MIT says in their mission statement that they want to “best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century,” they mean it, and are well on their way.

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html