Overview

On Valentine’s Day 2008, Steve Kazmierczak killed five and wounded eighteen at Northern Illinois University, then killed himself. But he was an A student, a Deans’ Award winner. How could this happen? CNN could not get the story. The Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and all others came up empty because Steve’s friends and professors knew very little. He had reinvented himself in his final five years. But David Vann, investigating for Esquire, went back to Steve’s high school and junior high friends, found a life perfectly shaped for mass murder, and gained full access to the entire 1,500 pages of the police files. The result: the most complete portrait we have of any school shooter. But Vann doesn’t stop there. He recounts his own history with guns, contemplating a school shooting. This book is terrifying and true, a story you’ll never forget.

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9780820338392

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Reviews

<p> Vann looks into the dark and isolated heart of the American soul. -- San Francisco Chronicle , on Legend of a Suicide

Vann's story, originally commissioned by Esquire magazine and winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, is complicated, but he tells it with grace and clarity. Kazmierczak's inner life was bleak, to put it mildly. The word 'bleak, ' though, has to be qualified. Vann's look at Kazmierczak is unflinching and careful; he presents exceedingly well-organized research on the shooter, a fleshed-out play-by-play of his life from young adulthood up until the attack, replete with quotes from e-mails, papers, and chat messages that trace his slow descent from a troubled young man with promise into one quietly spiraling out of control. --Max Winter, Boston Globe

Author Information

"David Vann is the internationally bestselling author of ""Caribou Island,"" ""A Mile Down,"" and ""Legend of a Suicide,"" published in seventeen languages and winner of ten prizes, including France's Prix Medicis for best foreign novel, selected for the ""New Yorker"" Book Club, ""The Times"" Book Club, BBC's Book at Bedtime, TV book shows in eight countries, and more than forty ""best books of the year"" lists worldwide. Currently a Guggenheim Fellow, Vann has also been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He's taught at Stanford, Cornell, and Florida State University and is currently an associate professor at the University of San Francisco."

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