|
Ceremonial Violence A Psychological Explanation of School Shootings: A Psychological Explanation of School Shootings | 
 enlarge | Author: Jonathan Fast
Publisher: Overlook Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $11.75
You Save: $14.20 (55%)
New (30) Used (12) from $11.27
Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 749894
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.3 x 1.3
ISBN: 1590200470
Dewey Decimal Number: 371.782
EAN: 9781590200476
ASIN: 1590200470
Publication Date: September 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: NEW, can ship anytime, with FREE POSTAL CONFIRMATION, for your confidence, ALWAYS Compare Feedback and EXPERIENCE! 100% SATISFACTION GUARANTEED 100%
| |
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Ceremonial Violence analyzes the Columbine high school shooting and four other cases and explains for the first time why teenagers commit school rampage shootings. These cases include:
Brenda Spencer, 16, who after shooting at elementary school children for no apparent reason explained to a reporter: "I hate Mondays."
Wayne Lo, 18, a brilliant Taiwanese student and violin prodigy who embraced white supremacist rhetoric. One night he stalked the campus of Simon's Rock College with a semi-automatic rifle picking victims at random.
Evan Ramsey, 16, who went on a shooting rampage in Anchorage, alerting some twenty-five friends beforehand so they could observe the mayhem.
Luke Woodham, 17, who claimed to have been controlled by demons when he killed his classmates.
In addition to these cases, Fast provides a detailed, clear narrative of the Columbine shootings. With his grasp of the elements of abnormal psychology, developmental psychology, sociology, and neurology that contribute to the homicidal mindset, Fast offers us a means of understanding and coming to terms with these tragedies.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 "SR" Porn December 27, 2008
Gregory Gibson (Gloucester, MA)
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
We don't make a big deal about Christmas around our house. Often, we try to go someplace far away for the holiday, but the excitement of the trip is always tinged with melancholy. December 14th is the anniversary of the 1992 school shooting at Simon's Rock College in which Galen was murdered. I won't speak for the rest of my family, but for me this is an occasion to ponder the astonishing nature of a universe that could take our brave, resilient, beautiful boy and leave us with Wayne Lo, his murderer, who snapped and broke all those years ago. It's a steep meditation.
Wayne writes to me a few times a year, usually with a small check which I deposit in the Galen Gibson Scholarship Trust. He earns the money by selling his artwork, via some guy named Zack, on the internet. This made the news for a moment in the spring of 2007 when a zealous fellow down in Houston coined the term "murderabilia" and decided to crack down on its sale. Murderers, he reasoned, should not profit from their crimes. Media people contacted me about this. I opined that donating money to a scholarship fund was one of the few ways that Wayne Lo, locked in prison for the rest of his life, could try to atone for what he'd done. Society, I told them, has been very efficient about punishment, but backward about reconciliation and rehabilitation. This was not the answer they wanted to hear, so it didn't get much play.
This past November I got a letter from Wayne that said, in part:
"There is a new book out called Ceremonial Violence: a psychological explanation of school shootings by Jonathan Fast. He devotes one chapter (chap. 2) to my crime. I had a friend send me a photocopy of that chapter alone and I discovered that Mr. Fast plagiarizes from Goneboy... He would take a sentence from one part of your book and mix it with another sentence from a different part and form a passage or paragraph... I'm just personally offended that he didn't even attempt to interview me for the book, but that's my narcissism speaking."
Well, that piqued MY narcissism. I bought a copy of the book and read through chapter 2. I noted first and foremost that Dr. Fast had a fascination with acronyms, perhaps because he thought they made his text sound more authoritative. School shootings thus became SR (school rampage) shootings; the Children's Gun Violence Prevention Act CGVPTA; Child Access Prevention laws CAP; even the Jefferson County Sherrif's Office was JCSO.
Fast used several quotes from my book, Gone Boy, all properly attributed. Nonetheless, I got the feeling that he was pilfering my goods. His descriptions of people and situations sounded very like mine. The report of Wayne in prison rocking back and forth on his parents' first visit came to me directly from Wayne's father and was reported only in my book; Fast used it without attribution. Out of all the hundreds of pages of testimony by psychiatrists in Wayne Lo's criminal trial, Fast repeatedly defaulted to the single characterizing sentence or phrase that I had chosen. There were half a dozen other little things, but most damningly, Fast cited and quoted from the firsthand accounts of two students, Jeremy Roberts and Rob Horowitz. Their narratives are accurate enough, but Roberts and Horowitz do not exist. I made those names up to conceal the identities behind them. Fast talked about them as if they were real people.
Perhaps Wayne Lo had a reason beyond narcissism to feel indignant. Judging by his footnotes, Jonathan Fast's account of the Simon's Rock case is made up almost entirely of newspaper accounts and other secondary sources. Apparently he did not take the trouble to interview any of the principals. If this was true of his work on Simon's Rock, what did it say about the rest of his book?
There was nothing to do but read on, and I have to admit it was, in its horrible way, a compelling read. Fast recounts thirteen school shootings, with several of them described a second time in greater detail. Ironies abound. Craven school shooter Luke Woodham pleads for mercy at the end of his spree because he'd delivered a pizza the night before to the arresting officer and had discounted the price. The narratives are shot through with dramatic details. A jury's verdict is considered during a violent thunderstorm, and then the verdict is read "by the shafts of sunlight that filtered in the courthouse windows." We get painfully specific reports of five shootings, culminating in a nearly minute-by-minute recitation of Harris and Klebold at Columbine. As an assemblage of school shooting trivia Ceremonial Violence surpasses even the New York Times' magisterial survey. But in the end, this ceaseless piling up of slaughtered innocents, poignant last words and hellish psychological interiors leaves the reader a little queasy.
I researched my account of the Simon's Rock shootings from 1992 to 1999, and by the end of my work I probably knew as much as any layman about such events. I can tell you with absolute certainty that there is nothing in Dr. Jonathan Fast's book that adds materially to what we knew about school shootings and their causes in 2000. School shooters were bullied. Many may have suffered abuse. They were unhappy kids who felt themselves to be outcasts. A not-surprising number of them wore thick glasses or dressed in black. They were all narcissists - "Drama Queens" (Dr. Fast's term) - and they all exhibited suicidal ideation. Fast's theory proposes a scenario in which "the candidate gets the idea of turning his suicide into a public ceremony." He lays this theory out in three pages in his Introduction, and then we're off to the races. Thirteen "SR" shootings later we've had about as much as we can handle. "I was raised in a family of storytellers," Fast tells us (he's the son of novelist Howard Fast). Perhaps he means it as a warning. There isn't much here except the stories, and the stories are unrelievedly, hair-raisingly grotesque.
Back in my Navy days, when there were such things as "dirty books," much of the smut we'd read aboard ship would be dressed up as important sociological treatises. The novel would begin with an Introduction by a Dr. Whoozits, warning us of the dangers to society inherent in lesbianism, incest, bestiality, or whatever special treat was about to be served up. Ceremonial Violence reminded me of one of those books. It is SR porn - probably a doctoral thesis that got exploited to service our seemingly bottomless fascination with such sickness. (A search for "Columbine" on Amazon.com yields 1547 results.)
Aside from his sloppy adaptation of secondary sources, Dr. Fast should be ashamed of allowing himself to be used in such a manner. Overlook Press should be ashamed of having used him, and we, I suppose, should be ashamed that school shooting books have to get written at all.
As Dr. Fast puts it,
"Regardless of our beliefs about the advisability of gun control laws, it is a simple fact that school shootings are impossible without guns that are affordable, available, easy to load and fire, and capable of firing many rounds within a few seconds."
In 2007, when the reporters wanted me to talk about "murderabilia," I asked them where they were when I wanted to talk about how easy it was for crazy people to get guns in America.
They had no answer for that one.
 A Rehase and Plagiarism? December 25, 2008
De White
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Having read, for example, Goneboy by Gregory Gibson [one of the references given in Ceremonial Violence] one can't but help notice many simularites between how some ideas and conclusions are expressed in Cermemonial Violence in the same words as those expressed in Goneboy. It appears to me that the "investigation" done by Jonathan Fast may have been more in the literature and newspaper files than in any interviews.
Having come to this conclusion, it was no surprise to find the same conclusions on the web. In fact there is an "open letter" from Gregory Gibson on the Parlez Moi Blog reproduced in part below:
"...Fast used several quotes from my book, Gone Boy, all properly attributed. Nonetheless, I got the feeling that he was pilfering my goods. His descriptions of people and situations sounded very like mine. The report of Wayne in prison rocking back and forth on his parents' first visit came to me directly from Wayne's father and was reported only in my book; Fast used it without attribution. Out of all the hundreds of pages of testimony by psychiatrists in Wayne Lo's criminal trial, Fast repeatedly defaulted to the single characterizing sentence or phrase that I had chosen. There were half a dozen other little things, but most damningly, Fast cited and quoted from the firsthand accounts of two students, Jeremy Roberts and Rob Horowitz. Their narratives are accurate enough, but Roberts and Horowitz do not exist. I made those names up to conceal the identities behind them. Fast talked about them as if they were real people. ...
I researched my account of the Simon's Rock shootings from 1992 to 1999, and by the end of my work I probably knew as much as any layman about such events. I can tell you with absolute certainty that there is nothing in Dr. Jonathan Fast's book that adds materially to what we knew about school shootings and their causes in 2000. ..."
Terrible! November 21, 2008
Z. godwin
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Ceremonial Violence is a product of bad research techniques. Jonathan Fast fails to interview the very subjects he bases his case studies on. Fast manipulates second hand information and accounts to back up his theories and conclusions. Fast offers presumptions and conjectures when hard facts are readily available. In chapter 2 of Ceremonial Violence, Fast plagiarizes from Goneboy: A Walkabout by Gregory Gibson. He borrows phrases verbatim without identifying tags or quotations. Ceremonial Violence cannot be trusted and utilized for research purposes.
 Fascinating! October 29, 2008
davi strand (brooklyn, ny)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I don't work with teens and I'm not a parent, but I was drawn to this book by its terrible yet fascinating subject matter. With his masterful story telling and his wealth of details, Jonathan Fast made each of these cases fresh. I felt as though I was in each town on the day of the tragedy, glued to my TV screen as the horrifying news broke. Maybe I'm morbid, but I was amazed by how entertained I was by this book.
Brilliant story teller October 17, 2008
A. J. Aveni (Sarasota Fl)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Dr. Fast combines the very best of story telling and clinical insight into this complex subject. Both his ability to lead us through the tragedies with a sense that we are eye witness to the acts, as terrible as they are, and his observations regarding the causes and possible solutions are remarkable. This is a book that should be required reading for both parents and educators, who need to be able to indentify the behaviors which can lead to catastrophic tragic consequences.
I believe this to be a significant work for the clinical community.
Tony Aveni
Denver, Colorado
|
|
|
SEO and Marketing TipsBETA RELEASE | |
