Book review: Newtown: An American Tragedy, by Matthew Lysiak
Matthew Lysiak's book tackles the challenge of drawing a portrait of the troubled young man, who killed 20 children and six adults in a Connecticut elementary school in 2012.
by Matthew Lysiak
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3 stars
Hector Tobar
Adam Lanza was, by all accounts, a strange child.
Matthew Lysiak's book tackles the challenge of drawing a portrait of the troubled young man, who killed 20 children and six adults in a Connecticut elementary school in 2012.
In junior high, Lanza carried around an empty briefcase and insisted on sanitising his desk each time he sat down. When he was four years old, he got his first gun, an aluminium Ruger 10/22. The boy who wouldn't allow himself to be touched "liked the feel of the gun in his hands". His mother, who had been told by a doctor that he suffered from Asperger syndrome, a form of autism, was thrilled to see her boy out in the woods with another boy, shooting at targets.
"There was a weirdness about him," a Cub Scout leader tells Lysiak. But with a gun in his hand, Lanza was different.
The 20-year-old Lanza was a cypher. His crime, among the most heinous in US history, demands a serious study of what transformed an odd boy into a killer. Unfortunately Newtown: An American Tragedy feels like the work of a reporter rushing to complete his book in time for the first anniversary of the December 14 tragedy.