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BOOK REVIEW: WHY MEADOW DIED: THE PEOPLE AND POLICIES THAT CREATED THE PARKLAND SHOOTER AND ENDANGER AMERICA'S STUDENTS By Andrew Pollack and Max Eden
The authors of Why Meadow Died, Andrew Pollack - father of murdered student Meadow Pollack - and Max Eden - former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute - without question, have no intention of entering into a discourse over topics pertaining to school shooters and their shootings. They are not going to blame victims or parents, or discuss gun control legislation, advocacy, and activism. Instead, they wage a controversial argument that school policy, and, thus, school boards, are ultimately responsible for contemporary school shootings. In Pollack and Eden's telling of it, the decisions of policymakers at Broward County collectively failed both Nikolas Cruz and the seventeen Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) students and teachers that were killed on February 14, 2018. The book is not published in a university press, and, as such, is not firmly academic in tone or posture. In the remainder of this book review we cover the book's main argument, comment on some stylistic concerns, and hint at broader, empirical implications of the authors' argument linking educational policies and school shootings at a national level.
While this book adopts a relatively unique approach to the identification of the antecedents of school shootings, the book has yet to receive, to the best of our knowledge, much if any scholarly review apart from Catlin's (2020) "A Mother and a Father and the Tragedy of School Shooting," a review that compares Why Meadow Died to Sue Klebold's book A Mother's Reckoning - Klebold being the mother of Dylan Klebold, responsible for a school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. "These books could not be more alike," Catlin (2020: p. 57) writes; they are both "very hard, induce tears, and are riveting upon examination." While these authors adopt markedly different viewpoints on preventative strategies, they both approach the subject matter from the parental viewpoint. Also, if the parental perspective in the wake of a school shooting was of interest to readers of Sue Klebold's A Mother's Reckoning, then we suspect...