Continuing the countdown of my books, from 1st to 25th, THE JACKAL‘S MISTRESS. Today it‘s my 10th, BEFORE YOU KNOW KINDNESS (2004). Fun fact: the lobster boy character? That's me. Also, though I was and am a vegetarian, I spent days in the woods with deer hunters researching this novel.
pickReading Guns made me furious. Furious because I live in a country where it's so easy for things like this to happen, furious because they happen with obscene regularity, furious because we have become numb and inured to it, and furious because our legislators refuse to pass laws that would decrease the likelihood of things like this continuing to happen. Read Guns, and you can be furious too. 5/5
pick😔🙄🤬😱😔😭😔🤔 An emotional rollercoaster! Disheartening, disturbing and thought provoking book about the plethora of guns in the US. Larson does a good job of explaining how it got so bad & tries to provide a solution to let people own guns while still protecting the public. Written more than 20 years ago, it is somewhat outdated and now seems a bit naive. Ultimately he lays the blame with the NRA & the entertainment industry. I tend to agree.
pickWritten by the journalist who wrote Columbine, I went into this expecting the same hard-hitting, deep dive he produced there. However, here Cullen focuses on the survivors of the Parkland tragedy & how the event spurred them to create a movement. While still emotional, & definitely inspirational, it didn‘t affect me quite the way his book on Columbine. I did learn new facts & am in awe of these teens (now mostly adults).
I clearly remember the afternoon of the shooting. Police sirens were screaming and it sounded like helicopters were on the rooftop of my apartment. Only a year ago we learned about another former student who killed himself, unable to deal with the trauma. Multiple kids… now adults… with suicide attempts… after experiencing this. No one needs automatic weapons besides our military. When the f*ck will laws acknowledge this? And I AM a gun owner.
pickTraces birth of March for Our Lives in the aftermath of the MSD school mass shooting. David Cullen‘s the media go-to analyst for school shootings, but he recognized that fewer people are concerned with the motive of the shooter. Instead, people are searching for solutions. Sadly, I don‘t think sensible solutions will be implemented in such a divided America. Still a powerful listen.
pickOverall this was a pick for me although much of the book was quite depressing, but gave me a better feel for the gun culture in the US. It was written 30 years ago but so much still seems relevant today, and most probably things have only got a lot worse over the past 30 years.
This is available to freely download if you are a member of Audible.
#AuthorAMonth @Soubhiville
pickPublished in 1995 this book is largely out of date but reading it and knowing the horrors that were still to come was maddening. At one point Larson lists places that people were still able to feel safe from guns and most of those places, like churches and grocery stores, have been the locations of mass shootings in recent years. Difficult to read this and know that decades later things feel less safe. #authoramonth
