Parkland by Dave Cullen is one of the most uplifting books you will read all year ... At a time of such national exhaustion, a book about a school shooting may not be the one you’re inclined to pick up off the shelf. Do it anyway. Parkland is a balm ... For a politics-hardened reader, stories of earnest activism and kids changing the world are boring at best, insultingly cliche at worst. Cullen deftly navigates what could have easily been a sentimental and patronizing story (not to mention a tedious one) ... Cullen does not bore us with banalities or mawkishness. He manages to use the word 'resilience' only once ... But the real genius of Parkland isn’t that it’s an inspirational tome. Instead, it’s practically a how-to guide for grass-roots activism ... Cullen is an adept storyteller, synthesizing a cacophony of voices and using his own simply to carry a reader cleanly through ... Parkland is a story touched by trauma, but it is not a story of trauma. It is a story born of violence, but it is not a story of violence. Instead, it is something both braver and more precise: It is the story of a carefully planned rebellion.
In his new book, Cullen spends barely three pages on the Parkland gunman, giving just the barest biographical details, mostly about his depression, and referring to him only as the 'mass murderer.' It’s a noble goal, to refuse to feed our fascination with the deranged teenage killer or provide the convenient horror movie plot ... But that commitment also presents a separate narrative challenge, which is how to create a story with drama and tension. Cullen spent the 11 months after the shooting following the kids, which is enough time to plot the stages of their crusade but not necessarily enough to understand their internal struggles ... I did find myself wishing for some more depth, detail or psychological complexity, something to cement these extraordinary kids in the public imagination so that we’d never forget what they somehow managed to pull off.
Cullen traces the movement from the students’ early meetings in their living rooms and first forays onto Twitter. He marks the instant when their Instagram feeds turned from sunsets and selfies to toe-to-toe battles with the National Rifle Association ... Parkland tells their story well and truly. It’s written with the clarity and depth and time — that’s the big thing, time — that the students who died and the students who live deserve, and that the nation grappling with it all needs. I was moved and informed and, most of all, heartbroken by it — even though it’s written with authentic hope.
... heartrending ... Parkland is the first book about the shooting that’s not marketed toward teens and young adults. It also may be the most optimistic of the bunch. Cullen is less concerned with recounting the horror that took place in the school’s freshman building, and analyzing the institutional and societal failures that led to it, than he is in capturing the urgency that propelled the movement from Kasky’s living room to voting booths across the country ... Parkland can be an inspiring read. [Cullen's] behind-the-scenes interviews and interactions with the group’s leaders provide a lot of insight into their strategies and expectations ... Cullen obviously connected with the kids, and he movingly relays their confidence that real and lasting change is within reach. If only he had taken more time to tell their story ... Parkland arrived just 363 days after the Stoneman Douglas murders. As such, the narrative often feels hurried, and Cullen occasionally succumbs to the first-they-did-this-and-then-they-did-that method of storytelling. His prose can seem unbridled.
... [Cullen] clearly and engagingly tells multiple stories simultaneously and brings a great number of people to vivid, distinctive life. He manages to flesh out and bring something new to the stories of the kids most readers likely know best, Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg. Even more interesting is getting to better know what makes others in the movement — like super organizer Jackie Corin and the initially wide-eyed freshman Daniel Duff, who had seven friends die in the attack — just as compelling ... The chapter 'The Memes Men' should be required reading for anyone convinced that teens are incapable of large-scale, committed action, for any teacher still leading class as though kids don’t realize they are a mere click away from nearly anything they want to learn or create ... Part character study, part media analysis, part political critique, Parkland ends up being many things. Thanks to Mr. Cullen’s gift for clear, involving storytelling, it ends up being, above all, a compelling 'year-in-the-life' tale of a group of ordinary, yet also extraordinary, teens.
Cullen, the author of the groundbreaking Columbine... brings his eloquence, expertise, combination of deep research and concision, and unbiased perspective to yet another mass school shooting, revealing its deepest layers and resonance ... This moving, defining, and important account of an essential and vital youth movement dedicated to change and saving lives belongs in every public and school library.
... Cullen focuses his latest book Parkland less on the shooting, more on the remarkable activism that came out of it ... One year after the shooting, what has changed? Cullen says it is still too early to determine the fate of March For Our Lives... And for that reason, perhaps also too soon for this book, which spends a lot of time on the minutiae of the kids’ high school lives and routine, and not enough time on the potential for the movement’s future — and for substantial gun reform in the US ... Unlike Cullen, the student leaders are happy to take the long view, drawing on the example of the years-long civil rights movement.
Cullen’s experience covering school shootings is clear in his nuanced portraits of parents of victims, and survivors and their parents ... There’s no escaping the fact that Parkland has come out quickly, having been researched and written in less than a year. Cullen’s closeness to the students is, at times, a disadvantage. He concentrates so narrowly on the movement’s development that the broader political context rarely comes into focus ... The Parkland students’ prom was the same weekend as the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Texas – one of many contrasts that could have made the book a richer portrayal of the American gun debate as a whole, and provided a clearer view of the students’ political opponents. Parkland only documents what happened at prom, the strain of trying to celebrate a high-school milestone while still mourning lost friends ... Parkland’s insistence on hope, its deep identification with the movement, results in a book that feels smaller than Cullen’s previous work.
Dave Cullen's Parkland is a book published too soon. Which is another way of saying it is not the book it wants to be ... Cullen does a creditable job of giving us the backstory to these developments: who the main students leaders were before the shootings, what galvanized them into action, how they found their focus and their energy ... Many of [Cullen's] arguments — that Parkland was different; that the endless Sisyphean cycle of violence, outrage, and ultimate inaction is at last being broken; that a new generation of activism is overturning received wisdom about the intractability of the United States’s deadly gun culture — look wildly premature if not hollow. And that, in turn, raises basic questions about Cullen’s ability to do what readers should reasonably expect from any author steeped in his subject: to guide them through the thicket of personalities and issues and conflicts, with which they most likely have some familiarity already, and give a sense of what matters and what does not. On that score, Cullen flounders badly and repeatedly ... Cullen spends no time with opponents of new gun legislation, so they remain nebulous, two-dimensional villains whose motives are simply assumed to be bad.
Instead of lingering on heartbreaking stories about the victims, Cullen offers detailed portraits of the movers and shakers of [March For Our Lives] ... Cullen's intentional curtailing of emotional intensity — plus the brevity of the window into the kids' lives — work against [the book]. Even so, Parkland is an unexpectedly lively chronicle with a powerful message.
... powerful, deeply reported ... With the same keen empathy [as in his previous book, Columbine], Cullen focuses on the extraordinary tale of how students in the city of Parkland metabolized their rage and grief into the powerful March for Our Lives movement and its ambition...
Cullen provides nuanced, sensitive portraits of the Parkland kids who have become media stars ... These are extraordinary young people, and Cullen does them and us a great service by showing their ordinary lives.
... a behind-the-scenes account not usually afforded to victims of mass shootings ... People may expect this journalistic piece to be tuned to certain tropes of by-minute play-by-play or a look into the killer’s mind. But thankfully that’s not the case ... this book emphasizes that those affected by the shooting are not broken beings or ghosts or actors—they are human beings who want no other person to experience the level of violence that they did. They, and we in solidarity, must march on.
