Columbine

Teacher/Pizza Guy

Jeff Kass

Explores the emotional and physical labor necessary to work nights as a pizza delivery driver and days as a high school English teacher. Teacher/Pizza Guy is a collection of autobiographical poems from the 2016–17 school year in which Jeff Kass worked as a full-time English teacher and a part-time director for a literary arts organization and still had to supplement his income by delivering pizzas a few nights a week. In the collection, Kass is unapologetically political without distracting from the poems themselves but rather adds layers and nuances to the fight for the middle class and for educators as a profession. The timing of this book is beyond relevant. As a public high school teacher in America, Kass's situation is not uncommon. In September 2018, Time published an article detailing how many public school teachers across the country and in a variety of environments work multiple jobs to help make ends meet. Teacher/Pizza Guy chronicles Kass's experience of teaching, directing, feeding people, and treading the delicate balance of holding himself accountable to his wife and kids, his students, his customers, and his own mental and physical health while working three jobs in contemporary America. The journey of that year was draining, at times daunting, at times satisfying, but always surprising. Many of the ideas for these poems were initially scribbled onto the backs of pizza receipts or scratched out during precious free moments amidst the chaos of the school day. A driving force behind the book is Philip Levine's poem "What Work Is," which Kass believes attempts to examine not only the dignity and complexity of what we think physical, tangible work is but also the exhausting, albeit sometimes fulfilling nature of emotional work. Teacher/Pizza Guy is a funny and relatable collection for readers, thinkers, educators, and pizza lovers everywhere.

Columbine

A True Crime Story : a Victim, the Killers, and the Nation's Search for Answers

Jeff Kass

classic in the tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song." --Book Jacket.

My Beautiful Hook-nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave

Poems

Jeff Kass

Poetry that shouts, snarls, laughs, and wants badly to believe we can all be better than we are now

Knuckleheads

Stories

Jeff Kass

These stories explore generational intersections - teens making, and adults looking back on, choices that define their lives.

True Believer

Jeff Kass

In True Believer, Jeff Kass intertwines fiction with reality as he delves into the origins of the Marvel superheroes, explores how the Marvel saga informed his own worldview, and implores us all to continue to believe in the forces of good Through lyric and narrative poems, formal and informal verse, and even a trio of limericks, Kass's poems both retell classic comic book tales and recall his personal experiences being a True Believer--attending New York City Comic-Con with his childhood friends, wishing he could control the weather while coaching his son's baseball team, and growing up reading about the Jewishness of The Thing, the Golem-like member of The Fantastic Four, which impacted Kass's understanding of his own identity. An ode to what Stan Lee called his devoted readers, True Believer is a call to arms and an invitation to discover the heroic in ourselves. If we can't be super-powered heroes, we can endeavor to be what those heroes embody: perseverance despite personal doubt, determination in the face of calamitous odds, and faith in the notion that humanity is worth saving.

Takedown

Jeff Kass

"Ann Arbor: a small city with a big university A city of cute.

Columbine

A True Crime Story : a Victim, the Killers, and the Nation's Search for Answers

Jeff Kass

classic in the tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song." --Book Jacket.

The Columbine High School Massacre (True Crime)

The True Story of One of the Most Devastating and Deadliest School Shooting in America History.

Blake Shadow

Step into the harrowing true story of one of America's deadliest school shootings with "The Columbine High School Massacre." On April 20, 1999, Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, became the site of unimaginable tragedy when two students launched a meticulously planned attack, leaving thirteen dead and a nation reeling in shock. In this meticulously researched narrative, look into the events leading up to the massacre, explore the lives of the perpetrators, and witness the moments of chaos and terror that unfolded within the school's halls. Through gripping storytelling, gain insight into the aftermath that forever altered the lives of survivors, families, and communities. As the nation grapples with the legacy of Columbine and the ongoing crisis of gun violence, "The Columbine High School Massacre" offers a poignant reminder of the human toll of such senseless acts and the urgent need for action to prevent future tragedies. Join us in honoring the memory of the victims whose lives were tragically cut short. Purchase your copy of "The Columbine High School Massacre" today and become part of the movement to create a safer and more compassionate world for all.

No Easy Answers

The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School (20th Anniversary Edition)

Brown, Brooks

On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, two seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, walked into their school and shot to death twelve students and one teacher, and wounded many others. It was the worst single act of murder at a school in U.S. history. Few people knew Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris better than Brooks Brown. Brown and Klebold were best friends in grade school, and years later, at Columbine, Brown was privy to some of Harris and Klebold’s darkest fantasies and most troubling revelations After the shootings, Brown was even accused by the police of having been in on the massacre—simply because he had been friends with the killers. Brown with journalist Rob Merritt tells his full version of the story. He describes the warning signs that were missed or ignored, and the evidence that was kept hidden from the public after the murders. He takes on those who say that rock music or video games caused Klebold and Harris to kill their classmates and explores what it might have been that pushed these two young men, from supposedly stable families, to harbor such violent and apocalyptic dreams. Shocking as well as inspirational and insightful, No Easy Answers is an authentic wake-up call for all the psychologists, authorities, parents, and law enforcement personnel who have attempted to understand the murders at Columbine High School. As the title suggests, the book offers no easy answers, but instead presents the unvarnished facts about growing up as an alienated teenager in America today. This edition contains a new afterword that describes what has happened in the United States since Columbine, and provides updates on the aftermath of the massacre.

Columbine

Dave Cullen

Ten years in the works, a masterpiece of reportage, this is the definitive account of the Columbine massacre, its aftermath, and its significance, from the acclaimed journalist who followed the story from the outset. "The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror . . ." So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. In the wake of Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this plague grows more urgent every year. What really happened April 20, 1999? The horror left an indelible stamp on the American psyche, but most of what we "know" is wrong. It wasn't about jocks, Goths, or the Trench Coat Mafia. Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on scene, and spent ten years on this book-widely recognized as the definitive account. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings-several reproduced in a new appendix. Cullen paints raw portraits of two polar opposite killers. They contrast starkly with the flashes of resilience and redemption among the survivors. Expanded with a New Epilogue

A Mother's Reckoning

Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy

Sue Klebold

"The mother of one of the two shooters at Columbine High School draws on personal recollections, journal entries and video recordings to piece together what led to her son's unpredicted breakdown and share insights into how other families might recognize warning signs,"--NoveList.

Violence in American Popular Culture

[2 volumes]

David Schmid

This timely collection provides a historical overview of violence in American popular culture from the Puritan era to the present and across a range of media. Few topics are discussed more broadly today than violence in American popular culture. Unfortunately, such discussion is often unsupported by fact and lacking in historical context. This two-volume work aims to remedy that through a series of concise, detailed essays that explore why violence has always been a fundamental part of American popular culture, the ways in which it has appeared, and how the nature and expression of interest in it have changed over time. Each volume of the collection is organized chronologically. The first focuses on violent events and phenomena in American history that have been treated across a range of popular cultural media. Topics include Native American genocide, slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and gender violence. The second volume explores the treatment of violence in popular culture as it relates to specific genres—for example, Puritan "execution sermons," dime novels, television, film, and video games. An afterword looks at the forces that influence how violence is presented, discusses what violence in pop culture tells us about American culture as a whole, and speculates about the future.