Newtown

December 16, 2013
Lysiak, a journalist for the New York Daily News, offers a comprehensive, moving account of the massacre which took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on December 14, 2012. Drawing on police documents, interviews, emails and other public records, he reconstructs the events which ultimately cost 28 lives, most of them children, and shattered a community. He pieces together a portrait of the killer, Adam Lanza, as a deeply damaged individual with numerous psychological and emotional issues, offering a chilling look at Lanza's background and contributing factors, including his mother's ill-fated attempts to encourage his passions. Lysiak loses some of his detachment and impartiality when he moves on to cover the incident and aftermath; here, he takes pains to play up the heroism and innocence of the victims, the pain of the families, and the trauma of a community. Readers will be hard-pressed to deny the raw emotional gut-punch of simple statements like "Olivia was going to play an angel." Extensive excerpts from speeches and eulogies further add to the weight of the narrative. However, once Lysiak delves into the volatile debate between mental health care and gun control, both hot topics after every such incident, it becomes clear that he has no true answers or grand messages, just the same "what ifs?" as everyone else. With better focus and less emotional manipulation, this could have been the definitive volume on the subject; instead, it falls somewhat short. Agent: Sharlene Martin, Martin Literary Management.

February 24, 2014
Lysiak goes into the heart of the Newtown massacre to try to recreate what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School and why. He explores the lives of the victims, the survivors, and the killer. His balanced approach avoids blaming in lieu of identifying the various dynamics at work and the issues that allowed for the event to occur. Narrator Verner turns in a winning performance, his voice conveying appropriate emotion while still presenting the material in clear manner. Verner provides subtle voices for dialogue but infuses them with accurate feeling. Additionally, he wisely avoids melodrama when describing the massacre. The audiobook also includes an insightful interview with Lysiak. A Gallery hardcover.

December 1, 2013
Meticulous account of the Newtown massacre and its aftermath. On Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza murdered 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. He had already killed his mother, and he ended by killing himself. New York Daily News journalist Lysiak covered the event, later moving to Newtown to gather more material, particularly about Lanza's troubled life. Suffering from Asperger's, Lanza was a difficult, angry, withdrawn child. His mother dealt ineffectually with his behavior, repeatedly pulling him out of schools that she believed were not serving his needs, which exacerbated his isolation. Their common bond was guns: When Adam was 4, she taught him to shoot at a firing range; when he was older, she gave him guns of his own. Their house was filled with firearms and ammunition, and Adam became an expert on weaponry, sharing information and advice on gun enthusiasts' websites. He was obsessed with mass murderers, correcting Wikipedia entries for them, and creating a 7-foot-long spreadsheet ranking killers "in order from most kills to least, along with the precise make and model of the weapons used...." Anders Behring Breivik, who shot 69 students at a summer camp in Norway in 2011, was Lanza's hero. The subtitle of the book is "An American Tragedy," but Norway was obviously not immune. Why did Lanza kill? Could he have been stopped? What can prevent future horrors? The author quotes experts, but questions remain unanswered: about the connection between autism and violence; about whether violent video games (Lanza was obsessed with them) lead to violent acts; about the efficacy of gun control laws (Lanza broke all of Connecticut's existing laws); about whether better mental health access could have stopped his descent into rage and paranoia; and about America's identity. Lysiak hopes to "inform the debate" generated by the tragedy; it's been a year, and this harrowing book might be a reminder that the debate needs reviving.

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