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    A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
    Unavailable
    A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
    Unavailable
    A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
    Audiobook11 hours

    A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy

    Written by Sue Klebold

    Narrated by Sue Klebold

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The acclaimed New York Times bestseller by Sue Klebold, mother of one of the Columbine shooters, about living in the aftermath of Columbine.

    On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.
     
    For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan's mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently?
     
    These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother's Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. In the hope that the insights and understanding she has gained may help other families recognize when a child is in distress, she tells her story in full, drawing upon her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and on countless interviews with mental health experts.
     
    Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother's Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. And with fresh wounds from the Newtown and Charleston shootings, never has the need for understanding been more urgent.
     
    All author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable organizations focusing on mental health issues.

    - Washington Post, Best Memoirs of 2016

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateFeb 15, 2016
    ISBN9780147526700
    Unavailable
    A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy

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    Reviews for A Mother's Reckoning

    4.5/5

    79 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      So much good shared in this. Thank you for your insight Sue Klebold.
    • 5/5
      Heartbreaking. Enlightening. Insightful. Honest. Sue changed the way I think about suicide, murder, brain illness, and the families of the inflicted. She changed the perception I have of how parenting affects - or doesn't affect - our children. I was about to enter high school when the Columbine High School shooting occurred so I grew up hearing about it in the media and in our school even though we are a thousand miles away from Colorado. The way we were taught to view Dylan and Eric (Trenchcoat Mafia) tainted how I viewed kids in my own school who I thought seemed like they'd be part of that group. Seeing Dylan's life from sue's perspective was interesting because it humanized someone I assumed was just a crazy monster. He was a human. Just broken.
    • 5/5
      This was the best book I've ever read/heard. It should be required reading for every parent. I feel as if this will help me to be a better, more attentive parent (not to say Sue and Tom weren't, but this helped me to see signs of depression I may have not otherwise have recognized before reading this insightful book) to things I may have otherwise overlooked. It, at times felt almost too personal to read because she so adeptly spilled her heart and soul in to this book. I hope the Harris family some day sees fit to tell us about all the signs they missed.
      Thank you Sue for this.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book. It was very informative and heart felt. I felt like it was a little repetitive, but I really felt for her in her situation. A mother can only see and do so much. I don’t believe what her son did was her or her family’s fault. Bless them!
    • 5/5
      My heart goes out to this family, and all those hurt by this and other senseless violence. Insightful and important message here.
    • 3/5
      I did not review this right after reading because I found it difficult to be concise. After listening to it, I felt sorry for Dylan. Sue was clearly the type of authoritarian parent who thought being controlling was the best way to raise children. For all of the insight the years since the tragedy has given her, she obviously cannot grasp how very much she was responsible for raising someone who needed help that she was too busy being a “normal parent with a normal family” to see.

      There were so many specific times she recounts that it was obvious that if she had asked Dylan why he thought something of why he felt a certain way that he could have been helped. She wasn’t interested in his experience, she was dismissive, and saddest of all when he did get in trouble with Eric before they minimized it and reacted by taking away his privacy. They frequently “tossed” his bedroom and she muses about the lengths he had to go to in order to hide things from them. She talks about wishing she had read his journal, when probably all she needed to do was take a few minutes to ask him a question and listen to his response. It took so long for her to actually say what the boys had done to get in trouble the year before that I thought the book was only going to reference it as “trouble” and never say what it was.

      It was clear that Sue saw/sees herself as a victim as much as anyone else. Not being a parent myself, there were several scenarios when I asked my husband what he would do if my stepson said “_____” to see how an actual parent would react. I found it difficult and depressing to read the words of a parent who wanted to pat herself on the back for being good parent while being completely blind to the fact that her child was a autonomous being with individual experiences that she knew nothing about because she didn’t care or know to find out about those experiences. Sue never fully acknowledges the horrible thing her son did and excuses him even as saying “I can’t excuse what he did.” She chooses to see him as a teen who completed suicide rather than a teen who murdered classmates before taking his own life. She blames Eric for the shooting and while it’s true Dylan probably would have just killed himself and not others had he not been close to Eric, the duty of helping a young man in emotional agony was on his family not his peers. Talk to your children. Ask them questions. Care enough to listen rather than searching their rooms. The book ultimately left me with the feeling that this tragedy could have been prevented had the people who were supposed to nurture Dylan cared more about actually CARING for him as opposed to caring about being perceived as a good parent by outsiders.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      She covered up some details that could have brought healing to the families impacted by the tragedy and in that regard was disappointing. For example, she says she was unable to share information from deposition, but did manage to say he said it wasn’t his parents fault on one of the videos. Like really. Was that one purpose to clear the parent’s name?
      She shared about the son she knew which makes it true to her experiences, but in so doing inadvertently minimizes the victims. Who wants to hear about a child truly loving a cat or dog, while simultaneously killing in cold blood. Your child thought a dog’s life was more valuable than human life. I understand this was also a part of his illness. Basically, I would not like this book if I were a family member of a victim. If you are going to tell a story tell the whole story not bits and pieces that show your own victimization. Tell all or nothing at all.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Devastating story. I admire Sue's courage in writing this...I really hope the profits go toward some charity or cause that helps victims of trauma. I can't help but think that Eric was the driving force begins the planning and implementation of the shooting. I think it's very sad that Dylan was unable to find another way to deal with his pain-and that ending his life had to involve others. I believe Eric tapped into Dylan's vulnerability and manipulated it for his own selfish and sinister plot. That's not to minimise Dylan's involvement-but for Sue and Tom to blame themselves- or worse-for some of the Media and Society to blame them is to overlook a chance to help the survivors-now that it has been some years since the tragedy-and they (the survivors)may start to feel overlooked whilst they continue to live with the physical and emotional scars of what happened at Columbine High School. I have always been against guns-and will always be-and absolute devastation like Columbine just serve to reinforce my position on guns and gun ownership. I'm thankful that I live in Australia where untrained people (mentally ill or otherwise) that do not need a weapon in the course of their employment -aren't permitted to carry concealed weapons.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      What an amazing insight to a mothers grief and dealings with the aftermath of her sons tragic actions against others and himself.
      If I could give Sue Klebold 10 STARS for this book I would! Her strength and courage throughout this tragedy is stunning. What an inspiration she is to others.
      At one time in my life I was one of those parents who would have immediately pointed fingers at the parents of kids who go thru with a massacre such as Columbine. Today after my own experiences in dealing with a daughter that suffers from major depression and reading this book I'm just the opposite.
      A HUGE THANK YOU to Sue for allowing others to see the pain, guilt, and sorrow she has dealt with over the years. I pray that it will allow others to open their eyes and realize it's not always the parents fault. I will highly recommend this book to everyone I know.
      God Bless you Sue and many prayers for peace.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of the best Audiobooks I heard. 2 thumbs up!

      1 person found this helpful