From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter
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Description
We, as a nation, have become desensitized to the shock and pain in the wake of mass shootings. In the bottomless silence between gunshots, as political stalemate ensures inaction, the killing continues; the dying continues. From a Taller Tower attends to the silence that has left us empty in the aftermath of these atrocities. Veteran journalist Seamus McGraw chronicles the rise of the mass shooter to dismantle the myths we have constructed around the murderers and ourselves.
In 1966, America’s first mass shooter, from atop the University of Texas tower, unleashed a new reality: the fear that any of us may be targeted by a killer, and the complicity we bear in granting these murderers the fame or infamy they crave. Addressing individual cases in the epidemic that began in Austin, From a Taller Tower bluntly confronts our obsession with the shooters—and explores the isolation, narcissism, and sense of victimhood that fan their obsessions. Drawing on the experiences of survivors and first responders as well as the knowledge of mental health experts, McGraw challenges the notion of the “good guy with a gun,” the idolization of guns (including his own), and the reliability of traumatized memory. Yet in this terrible history, McGraw reminds us of the humanity that can stop the killing and the dying.
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Kirkus Book Review
A meditative history of mass murder by gunfire. Freelance journalist McGraw begins in 1966, when a former Marine climbed a tower at the University of Texas and began firing. When he was finally brought down after murdering 17 people, he was said to have had a brain tumor--though that did not prevent the shooter from amassing an arsenal and planning his spree. Of all the mass killings since--Columbine, Christchurch, Parkland, the list goes on--there are, notes the author, only a few points in common. Though assaults by gun are fewer than by fists or knives, "when an active shooter--and it is most often a male--does get his hands on a semiautomatic rifle, the results are catastrophic." The string of catastrophes that McGraw chronicles ends with a shooting from a Las Vegas hotel window "a hundred feet higher than the Texas shooter" in which an astonishing 471 people were hit with bullets and 102 died. That shooter--McGraw is scrupulous, with a couple of willful exceptions, about not naming names, denying killers the publicity they crave--was not, strictly speaking, insane. He may have been evil, but that is an amorphous, fairly useless concept that helps remove agency. What can be said about the killers in general is that they're psychologically troubled and make their troubles known before they act, oftentimes only to be ignored. One young man who slaughtered 26 people, many of them schoolchildren, was diagnosed with numerous mental health issues, yet his mother, a gun enthusiast, bought him weapon after weapon. She was the first to die. The ease with which such guns can be acquired (2 million have entered the market since the Newtown massacre) is one of many seemingly intractable problems. That, along with a would-be killer's sense of entitlement, contributes to a legacy of incomprehensible violence, of which McGraw writes, with grim poetry, "There is no silence on earth deeper than the silence between gunshots." A memorable, necessary contribution to the national conversation on gun violence. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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Citations
McGraw, S., & Wayne, R. (2021). From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter (Unabridged). Tantor Media, Inc.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)McGraw, Seamus and Roger Wayne. 2021. From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter. Tantor Media, Inc.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities (Notes and Bibliography) Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)McGraw, Seamus and Roger Wayne. From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter Tantor Media, Inc, 2021.
Harvard Citation (style guide)McGraw, S. and Wayne, R. (2021). From a taller tower: the rise of the american mass shooter. Unabridged Tantor Media, Inc.
MLA Citation, 9th Edition (style guide)McGraw, Seamus, and Roger Wayne. From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter Unabridged, Tantor Media, Inc, 2021.
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Collection | Owned | Available | Number of Holds |
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Libby | 1 | 1 | 0 |