Parkland audiobook

There are strains of sadness woven into this story, but this is not an account of grief. These kids chose a story of hope. This is such a beautiful piece of journalism. I love how Cullen puts so much of himself into his work and treats the subjects he tackles, as well as the people he meets and talks with along the way, with such sensitivity and empathy.Some people obviously rated this book one star without reading it because they think it is about taking away their guns. Actually, it's not really about that at all. While issues of gun control are natural discussions to rise out of this book and the events it documents, it is really about an incredibly inspirational group of young people who finally said enough is enough. This book is about them.Cullen wasn't sure if he wanted to get involved in the subject of school shootings again. After he published Columbine, he was left with secondary PTSD and had to distance himself from victims' stories for his own mental health. But Parkland was not just another school shooting; it was the start of something much bigger. Out of it grew the March For Our Lives demonstration, led by the kids most affected by the lack of change. After shootings, adults typically freaked out and talked about gun control for a while before it quieted down again. This time was different. This time the kids were standing up and saying "Please stop killing us."Cullen got to know these kids really well. They welcomed him into their lives and here he recreates them on the page as fleshed-out, quirky, flawed, young humans. Their drive to make a better world weathers disdain and false rumours. All to get a few basic laws passed that seem like common sense to me. Well, they actually seem conservative to me.I won't pretend to understand the gun debate in America. I don't mean that in a judgmental way-- I mean I literally don't understand it because I have grown up with a completely different mindset. I come from a country that has had one school shooting - the Dunblane massacre of 1996 - which preceded a swift ban on all handguns. 17 people died, they changed the law, and civilians gave up their guns. We now have one of the lowest rates of gun homicides in the world. I am not old enough to remember a time when people owned guns and I must admit it shocked me when I learned that in the U.S. civilians have access to devices that can kill someone with the flick of a trigger. Guns were always scary things that existed in movies; they were never a part of my "real life".So I am definitely an outsider on this issue, but even I felt completely drawn into the March For Our Lives movement. Cullen really is a wonderful writer and he brings a lot of kindness to his work. Despite what some will assume, he doesn't push his own opinions on gun laws. Instead, he narrates a story and lets the conclusions reveal themselves. A great book.Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube

It became clear quickly that suburban kids feared violence inside their school—once in a lifetime, but horrific—and the Chicago kids feared violence getting there. At the bus stop on their porch, walking out of church. It could happen anywhere, and it did… Martin Luther King had preached six principles of nonviolence…The Parkland kids were embarking on #4: “Suffering can educate and transform.” After the seminal Columbine shootings in 1999, Dave Cullen undertook to research the event deeply, to find out what the truth was of the shooters, their motivations, planning, and outcomes, and to dispel the many false notions that had made their way through the media like a Russian virus after the event. In a way it was a whodunit, and a whydunit. His book, Columbine, was an in-depth historical look, examining what had happened, after the fact. This included following up with many of those who survived the attack, for years after. Dave Cullen - image from GR Columbine and Parkland may have been similar events, but they are very different books. This time, with his reputation as the go-to reporter on stories having to do with mass-shootings, particularly mass school-shootings, Cullen had the credentials to ask the Parkland survivors for access as they worked through it all. Four days after the shooting he called, and spoke with the entire early MFOL (March For Our Lives) group on speakerphone. The next day he was there. Cullen proceeded to cover the emerging stories in person, when possible, and by phone, on-line, and via diverse media, when not, continuing through 2018. What he has produced is a you-are-there account of the birth of a movement. Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu described March for Our Lives as one of the most significant youth movements in living memory. “The peaceful campaign to demand safe schools and communities and the eradication of gun violence is reminiscent of other great peace movements in history,” he said. “I am in awe of these children, whose powerful message is amplified by their youthful energy and an unshakable belief that children can—no, must—improve their own futures. One could do worse, if looking at how to begin a movement, than to pore through Cullen’s reporting, as the kids of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School pivot from the physical and emotional carnage of a brutal armed attack on their school to organizing a regional, then national call for gun sanity. Parkland tells two stories, the personal actions of the teenagers involved and the broader view of the movement that they helped solidify. Cullen offers not only a look at some of the central people who built this movement, Emma Gonzalez, Jackie Corin, Alex Wind, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, Dylan Baierlein, and others, but shows how their sudden rise to fame impacted both their movement and them, personally.There are just so many hours in a day. In very concrete ways, committing large swaths of one’s time to political action meant that there was less time for other parts of what had been their lives. Extracurriculars was the obvious first hit. Theater, music, sports all suffered. But academic ambitions were close behind. Tough to keep up with multiple AP classes, for example, if you are stretched thin organizing a national political bus tour. And tough to maintain perfect grades when you keep getting home on the red-eye after an interview in LA or New York. Friendships suffered, or at the very least shifted. If you were one of the cool kids, but were now hanging out with the nerds, odds are you would get ditched. Of course, the upside is that you replace as friends a bunch of people of low value with people who are actually worth something. And you might imagine that, this being an adolescent-rich environment, jealousy might rear its ugly head. For example, Emma Gonzalez was transformed from just one of the kids at school to a national icon, as Emma and the other MFOL leaders were regularly having meetings with national figures and celebrities to discuss gun control. Might just make the other kids think you have gotten too big for your britches. Some of the organizers even dropped out of school to complete their studies on line. And that does not even begin to touch on PTSD, or death threats. Hogg, in fact, was frequently not on the bus but traveling separately in a black SUV accompanied by bodyguards. If he were a politician, one of the staffers told me, the intensity of interest in him would merit 24-hour Secret Service surveillance. “We get people armed to the teeth showing up and saying, ‘Where’s David Hogg?’ ” Deitsch told me. An outfit called the Utah Gun Exchange had been following the kids on tour all summer — on what it called a pro–Second Amendment “freedom tour” — sometimes in an armored vehicle that looks like a tank with a machine-gun turret.The NRA seems to take Hogg’s existence as an affront, having tweeted out his name and whereabouts and inciting its approximately 5 million members by perpetuating the falsehood that the Parkland kids want to roll back the Second Amendment. Hogg’s mother, Rebecca Boldrick, says that in June she received a letter in the mail that read, “Fuck with the NRA, and you’ll be DOA.” - from Lisa Miller’s New York Magazine article, David Hogg, After Parkland What does it take to build a movement? Why did this movement catch on, and grow? Was it a propitious confluence of events, right time, right place? If Parkland had happened a year or two years earlier, would it have had the same impact? Would the MFOL movement have gained the traction it has garnered?The March for Our Lives rally in DC drew 800,000, the largest rally crowd in DC history – image from USA TodayThe core group was blessed with a considerable concentration of talent. One element was media savvy. Just three days after the shooting, Emma’s ”We call B.S.”speech was a call to…well…arms, a call for those being victimized by our national gun fetish to stand up and demand that the adults in the nation start behaving like they are actually grown-ups, a call to legislators to act. It resonated, and went viral. Cameron came up with the #NeverAgain hashtag (although it had been notably used before) as an appropriate motif for the movement. He was also a natural performer, who had been comfortable in stage settings in front of adults since he was seven. David Hogg’s realtime video of the shooting from inside the school during the attack gained the shooting even more national coverage than it might otherwise have gotten. Jackie Corin was preternaturally adept at organizing the details of the movement, coping with scheduling, getting permissions, learning who needed to be contacted, all the office-manager-plus-organization-leader skills that are totally required but rarely available. Less than a week after creating her Twitter account, Emma would surpass a million followers—about double that of the NRA. By the summer, Cameron would amass 400,000 followers, David twice that, and Emma at 1.6 million towered over them all. Another element was the availability of supportive adults. This began, of course, with the parents of the organizers, but also some parents of the shooting victims. And beyond the immediate there was input from interested adults from outside the area, people able to offer not only money but media access. George Clooney got in touch, offering not only a sizeable contribution, but a connection to a high-end PR agency. State and national political people got involved as well. One particularly meaningful connection was made with the Peace Warriors in Chicago, local activists whose work in trying to fend off violence dovetailed particularly well with the Parklanders. The relatively wealthy suburban kids were worried about violence in their schools. The Peace Warriors lived in a world in which getting to and from school unharmed was the challenge. The joining of the school safety movement with an urban gun safety movement, was seminal, changing the focus of the Parklanders from school safety to gun safety. Bet you did not hear much about that in the papers. The Peace Warriors arrived at just the right moment. They helped shape the MFOL policy agenda and the tenor of their approach. They all kept talking: by email, phone, and text. The Parkland kids peppered the Peace Warriors with questions about the six principles, and then burrowed deeper on their own. The more they learned, the more they found it was like listening to themselves—a better, wiser version of the selves they were fumbling toward. How liberating to discover Martin Luther King Jr. had already done all that work. Brilliantly. He had drawn from Gandhi, and it was amazing how well the principles stood up across time, space, and cultures. The stages involved in the group’s growth and how the movement shifted focus makes for fascinating reading. Beginning with the initial rally, growing to larger memorials, then a rally at the state capital, then the nation’s capital, then a cross country bus tour in Summer 2018, from coverage in local news media to national, even global news coverage. Cullen gives us enough without overwhelming with too much detail on the challenges involved in the logistics of making rallies, tours, and marches happen, and the upsides and downsides of ongoing national exposure. Some of MFOLs core leaders even decided to keep away from any coverage that might focus on personal portrayals, as media stardom was seen as distracting from the group’s message.Emma Gonzalez is distraught while giving her “We Call B.S” speech in Fort Lauderdale days after the shooting – image from the NY TimesI do not really have any gripes about the book. It was well written, engaging, informative and moving. It also offers up the odd surprise here and there, like the source of national disunity over using April 20th, the date of the Columbine attack, as the day for a national student walkout. As for why this movement caught fire when it did, the jury is out. It may have to do with the national backlash against the excesses of the Trump-led right, disgust, finally, with expressions of “thoughts and prayers” absent any attempt to address the underlying problem. But yeah, it definitely helps that the victims were mostly white kids in a well-to-do suburb. Of course, this is hardly the first time mostly white suburban children have been so murdered. But maybe it was a final straw. In a way this strikes me as an echo of larger social trends. As the middle class becomes more and more squeezed by flat wages, declining benefits, increasing taxes (it is not our taxes that get cut), and a threatened safety net, the miseries that have long troubled working-class people, particularly urban people of color, have been, more and more, visited on middle class white people. (See Automating Inequality) Just as the opioid epidemic was once a feeder of three-strikes legislation, and widespread carnage, the current opioid crisis, the one visited on more and more white people, portrays addiction as less a failure of personal morality and more a manifestation of biological addiction, or at the very least, predisposition. When black people are getting shot in ghettoes, it’s business as normal, but when white kids are getting mowed down in their schools, it is a national crisis. It will be interesting to see how the MFOL movement sustains going forward. While there is no certainty of success, in the long or short terms, there is cause for hope. Even though changes in gun regulations MFOL wrested from Florida lawmakers were modest, getting any change at all was a huge success. Wins, of any sort, have been as rare as brave legislators, and this definitely counted as a win. The road ahead, though, remains long, hard, and fraught with impediments and peril. And people keep dying early, wasteful deaths. In his Broadway show one night in Summer 2018, Bruce Springsteen reached back fifty years, and drew a straight line to Martin Luther King Jr., assuring us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but tends toward justice”—but adding a stern corollary” “That arc doesn’t bend on its own.” Bending it takes a whole lot of us, bending in with every ounce of strength we’ve got. Review first posted – February 22, 2019Publication date – February 12, 2019==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I usually move it to the comments section directly below, which I did. However, in 2021, GR further constrained reviewers by banning external links from comments, so to see the full EXTRA STUFF part of this review you will have to continue on to my site, Coots’s Reviews, where the review is posted in its entirety. Coot’s Reviews

This book is not about the tragedy on February 14th 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Instead, it is about all that the student activists accomplished in the following year and how they did it. I felt like I’d followed this story pretty closely, but I was stunned by some of the things I learned. And those things are the reasons I want people to read this book. I think most folks will be as shocked as I was to find out how ATF background checks are conducted, and why it is that way. I was floored by all that these students accomplished over one summer and I was delighted to see their efforts to include other young activist groups that were not receiving the same media attention, such as Black Lives Matter, BRAVE & The Peace Warriors. As expected, being familiar with Mr. Cullen's work, Parkland is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Honest, yet hopeful and inspiring.I simply had to share this with "my" students. I took it in this week, and donated my copy to their classroom library. There was so much interest, I'm going to add a couple more copies soon. Everyone that wishes to read Parkland should have that opportunity.

A compelling blend of documentation and inspiration, and a must read for anyone concerned about gun safety. SUMMARYThe story of PARKLAND is told through the voices of the key participants whose personalities, and outlooks are diverse: David Hogg, 17; Emma González, 18; Cameron Kasky, 17; and Jackie Corin, 17. The book takes us into the hearts and minds of these and other Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students as they created a national movement while at the same time coping with the horrific event that has altered them forever. DAVE CULLEN, who has felt the effects of reporting on school shootings for the past twenty years, watched as the students immediately pushed back on the NRA, and the elected officials that take their money. And he knew this time was different, he knew he had to be there and he had to write this book. Cullen, author of Columbine, takes us on a nine-month journey of a potential pivotal moment in American culture. He gives us insight into the behind the scenes activities of the memorials, the Tallahassee rally, the Town Hall meeting, the March for our Lives, the creation of their gun safety platform, and the Road to Change tour.REVIEWPARKLAND is an evocative and enlightening narrative of the events following the shooting of 17 students and staff in Florida. Cullen has masterfully captured the thoughts, feelings and mood of the students and their activities as they unfolded. Living in Florida, having attended the Tallahassee rally and having read much of the Parkland press, I was pleasantly surprised by the details and perspective of the book. One of the things I didn’t know about was that the students adversaries had armed themselves with assault weapons and tailed them throughout Texas and Utah on their Road to Change bus tour, in an attempt at intimidation. DAVE CULLEN was in Parkland twenty four hours after the shooting happened and he had tremendous access to the students, their family and friends, their living rooms, and their meetings. He followed these newly formed activists for nine months, and found them to be a major force to be reckoned with. Through this book we can feel their fear, their anger, their sadness and most importantly, their indomitable drive to make a difference. Cullen has given us a remarkable view into their call to action. His writing is a compelling blend of documentation and inspiration and it is a must read for everyone concerned about gun safety. These kids rock! Publisher Harper AudioPublished February 12, 2019Narrated Dave Cullen, Robert Fass Review www.bluestockingreviews.com

Believe it or not, author Dave Cullen did not set out to be the nation's leading "talking head" about school massacres. But he did such a brilliant job with his COLUMBINE regarding the mass murder in a Colorado high school that he was prevailed upon to write this PARKLAND when a similarly horrific, but somewhat different turn of events, killed so many teens in a middle-class Florida high school.The good news is -- Cullen is up to his usual standards. I agree completely with my fellow GR reviewer Emily May, who called PARKLAND a "beautiful work of journalism." The even better news is that Cullen faithfully reports the actions of Margery Stoneman Douglas High School survivors, the students and others who took the killings as a tripwire, not just one more dispiriting atrocity. The notion that "they're mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" holds well here.Now, to do this Cullen has to inject himself into this narrative to a somewhat larger extent than in COLUMBINE. Nonetheless I wish this well crafted book all the best, and look forward to Cullen's next book, SOLDIERS FIRST, whose publication was postponed into next year so that Cullen could research and write this one. Dave Cullen writes such wonderful books -- he seems well on the way to becoming a national treasure.

Dave Cullen does it again! After meticulously researching the massacre at Columbine, he now turns his attention away from the perpetrators and writes about those who build up the resistance against America's lax gun laws: A group of Parkland survivors, among them by now well-known activists like Emma González ("We call B.S.!"), David Hogg and Cameron Kasky (Interview with Bill Maher) as well as organizational mastermind Jaclyn Corin. Those kids put American politicians to shame by creating a nationwide network of initiatives that are fighting for better gun control, and their campaigns, notably "Vote for Our Lives", undoubtedly contributed to the Blue Wave in recent elections - after years of accepting the power of the NRA, a de facto minority group, as a given, high school and college students have destroyed the conviction that you can't win elections by rallying against the extreme pro-gun lobbying group. And they are just getting started. Cullen does a fantastic job describing the situation the Parkland survivors found themselves in: Severely traumatized after the incident, their activism has been a measure of self-empowerment that propelled them to international fame with all its consequences. While privately struggling with the tragedy and its repercussions, they took on a task generations of grown-ups didn't dare to touch. It's particularly intriguing to read about the inner workings of their organization and (brilliant) strategic ideas while also revisiting what we've all seen on CNN: Adults daring to smear those kids as "crisis actors", pundits telling them - who were under attack in their own school - they didn't know what they were talking about, and of course the classic "well, it's always been this way, thoughts and prayers, thank you, next". The good news is, these adults seem to start losing political ground in the US, and it's high time this happens. From a European perspective, American gun laws are very hard to understand (I can assure you that all the stuff the NRA says can't be done is done basically everywhere in the Western world except in the US), and I was terrified when I first stepped on the campus of my American university and read the sign that said "no guns on these premises" - to have to put up such a sign in the first place seems like a problem to me, and apparently, to more and more Americans as well. But reading Cullen's book, there was a parallel to the situation on our side of the pond that struck me: Looking at the current "Fridays for Future" marches where students demand more responsible climate policies, we hear the same "those children don't know what they're doing" arguments. Well, they do, and the Parkland kids have demonstrated that such movements can become major forces to be reckoned with. Times are tough, but those kids might turn out to be way tougher, and we can all find our own ways to support their causes if we choose to do so.This is a well-researched book that provides interesting insights and perspectives. I can't wait to read Cullen's upcoming Soldiers First.

"The New York Times bestselling author of Columbine offers a deeply moving account of the extraordinary teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting who pushed back against the NRA and Congressional leaders and launched the singular grassroots March for Our Lives movement.Emma Gonzalez called BS. David Hogg called out Adult America. The uprising had begun. Cameron Kasky immediately recruited a colorful band of theatre kids and rising activists and brought them together in his living room to map out a movement. Four days after escaping Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, two dozen extraordinary kids announced the audacious March for Our Lives. A month later, it was the fourth largest protest in American history.Dave Cullen, who has been reporting on the epidemic of school shootings for two decades, takes us along on the students’ nine-month odyssey to the midterms and beyond. With unrivaled access to their friends and families, meetings and homes, he pulls back the curtain to reveal intimate portraits of the quirky, playful organizers that have taken the nation by storm. Cullen brings us onto the bus for the Road to Change tour showing us how these kids seized an opportunity. They hit the highway to organize the young activist groups mushrooming across America in their image. Rattled but undeterred, they pressed on in gun country even as adversaries armed with assault weapons tailed them across Texas and Utah trying to scare them off. The Parkland students are genuinely candid about their experiences. We see them cope with shattered friendships and PTSD, along with the normal day-to-day struggles of school, including AP exams and college acceptances. Yet, with the idealism of youth they are mostly bubbling with fresh ideas. As victims refusing victimhood, they continue to devise clever new tactics to stir their generation to action while building a powerhouse network to match the NRA’s. This spell-binding book is a testament to change and a perceptive examination of a pivotal moment in American culture. After two decades of adult hand-wringing, the MFOL kids are mapping a way out. They see a long road ahead, a generational struggle to save every kid of every color from the ravages of gun violence in America. Parkland is a story of staggering empowerment and hope, told through the wildly creative and wickedly funny voices of a group of remarkable kids."

The very real, very human stories of a group of kids dealing with a very real, very human tragedy. This book is about loss, grief, and most importantly, action. These are not crisis actors. They are not being put up to anything by their parents. They are real kids thrust into the public sphere by horrific events who decided to reject victimhood and to DO SOMETHING so that this time would be different. Beautifully written, this book shows you all sides of these brave, smart, and determined kids and the movement they built. Don’t expect a lot of policy. Rather, this book, like the March for our Lives movement, is a lesson in activism and civics about how anyone willing to roll up their sleeves can make a difference and change the national conversation. It’s about long bus rides, planning sessions, sleepless nights, savvy use of technology, face-to-face conversations with gun owners, meetings with politicians that don’t go anywhere . . . and some that do. So, will this time be different? I think it already is. Parkland is seared on our collective memory and the debate IS changing. There is a ground swell in this country of people demanding change on so many issues, and when we do finally get sensible changes to our gun policy, I know it will be at least in part because of these kids and their movement.

Moving and inspiring to say the least I read this for round 1 of the booktube prize. You can see my full thoughts here: https://youtu.be/5QGUMOHG3Ts

The Parkland shooting of 2018 is different because it spawned an entire movement against gun violence. This is the story of the teenagers who took on the system and traveled the country, speaking with politicians, other mass shooting victims, and gun rights advocates. The author does an admirable job following around the teenagers and interviewing them so that we get a sense of what it was like the day of the shooting, the weeks afterward, and the buildup to the huge March for our Lives in Washington DC later that year. I got the sense that this generation is determined to change things, and given the gridlock that has us stuck in the same situation year after year, I hope they can. Every month there seems to be another mass shooting, some thoughts and prayers, and no movement on even simple agreed upon gun laws such as background checks. My favorite part was how they joined up with the kids from Chicago, ground zero for gun violence, and helped those kids in their fight. I also get a refresher in the 6 principles of of nonviolence that go back to Martin Luther King: PRINCIPLE ONE: Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people. It is active nonviolent resistance to evil. It is aggressive spiritually, mentally and emotionally. PRINCIPLE TWO: Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding. The end result of nonviolence is redemption and reconciliation. The purpose of nonviolence is the creation of the Beloved Community. PRINCIPLE THREE: Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice not people. Nonviolence recognizes that evildoers are also victims and are not evil people. The nonviolent resister seeks to defeat evil not people. PRINCIPLE FOUR: Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform. Nonviolence accepts suffering without retaliation. Unearned suffering is redemptive and has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities. PRINCIPLE FIVE: Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate. Nonviolence resists violence of the spirit as well as the body. Nonviolent love is spontaneous, unmotivated, unselfish and creative. PRINCIPLE SIX: Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice. The nonviolent resister has deep faith that justice will eventually win. Nonviolence believes that God is a God of justice.Choose love instead of hate. I've seen that sentiment a lot of places and it embodies the mature beyond their years kids of Parkland.

In February, seventeen died at Douglas High, along with 1,044 others in America. In the first six months of 2018, over 1,700 kids were killed or injured by guns... I went into this book expecting to have the same experience I did when I read Columbine and I am happy to report, reading this was an entirely different experience, an experience I embraced. When I finished reading Columbine I was crushed, distraught and filled with a sense of hopelessness. The author, Dave Cullen made mention of the toll it took on him mentally writing that book which is why I think Parkland had such a hopeful read to it. Parkland: Birth of a Movement takes you through the birth of a movement which calls for the end of gun violence and serious gun reformations. The individuals that Cullen profiled through the book are inspiring and reading this book makes me feel like they made a huge impact. A great read.

Really well done. Not about the shooting. About the surviving activists. Cullen is genius but the content wasn’t as powerful as I had hoped. Still really good and a smooth read.

RTC