What are you reading?

[Kätzchen]

Originally Posted by nycfembbw

Thanks for the descriptions, Katzchen. Could you talk more about what Lethal Passage is about?

I just began this book tonight but will excerpt the passage on the back of the book:

This devastating book begins with an account of a crime that is by now almost commonplace: On December 16th, 1988, sixteen year old Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked into his backpack. By day's end, he has killed one teacher and severely wounded another.

In Lethal Passage Erik Larson shows us how a disturbed teenager was able to buy a weapon advertised as "the gun that made the 80s roar." In so doing, he not only illustrates America's gun culture - its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists - but also offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearm. The result of the book that can - and should - save lives, and that has already become an essential text in the gun-control debate.

I'm only on page 42, but Larson gives the audience a vivid description of Elliot in that he is a young black teenager who was acutely bullied at school (of religious affiliation) and my heart went out to Elliot and his mother - the caretaker and head of household of their own little family. Larson has also laid the groundwork, thus far, for how invasive and pervasive gun culture is within the fabric of American life. It's a short read (240 pages long) but it also comes with an extensive list of references at the back of the book, too.