She burned down her studio. She made a bonfire of her paintings, the chil-dren's toys, their books, their furniture, their clothes, their shoes.

There will never again be a book that can credibly be labeled ·great," not because outstanding books are no longer being produced, but IS IT POSSIBLE TO PRODUCE WRITING THAT GENERATES A GREATER SENSE OF CONNECTION TO THE WORLD AND ITS INHABITANTS? OF SELF-UNDERSTANDING? because the world is now awash with writ-ing that no one reads,

The only way out is through.

In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing·

The book said nothing about the seeds of the wild potato and ' it is Krakauer's hypothesis that, as he grew more desperate, McCandless took the book's silence on the seeds as permission to ingest them. If Krakauer is right, one could say that McCandless was killed off by a read-ing practice that placed too much faith in books, a practice that forgets that the world in all its infinite complexity and particularity will always exceed the explanatory grasp of any single text and, indeed, of all texts taken in their totality

ultimately undone by the great trust he placed in the written word.

highlighted passages celebrating chastity and moral purity (65-66). On some plywood he had written what Krakauer calls McCandless's "declaration of independence·:

both what he chose to read and how he chose to read it.

Krakauer develops a sense of McCandless's inner life and eventually comes to some understanding of why the young man was so susceptible to being seduced by the writings of London, Thoreau, Muir, and Tolstoy.

When Tull's initial efforts to harm his rival fail, he turns to Steve Cousins, a financially secure, semi-retired criminal, who now entertains himself by pursuing "recreational" adventures in his profession: his spe-cialty, as he defines it, is "fuck[ing] people up" for sport

Amis pits two writers against each other: Richard Tull, the author of artistic, experimental (that is to say, unreadable) novels; and Gwyn Barry, who is vapid and soulless, but whose eventless, multicultural, utopian novel. Arnelior, has become an international phenomenon.

They read, they wrote, they talked. And at the end of the process, they tried to kill everyone they could.

wrote and produced for all different sorts of media; they read a range of material that supported their beliefs and that taught them how to put together their incendiary devices; they hung out with like-minded individuals and discussed their ideas. They relied on writing to post their scathing observations about their peers on Harris's Web site; they composed poems in their creative writing class that their teacher described as "dark and sad";

swastikas were found scratched in a stall in one of the high school's newly painted bathrooms.

What legal or educational response could be equal to the challenge of controlling the behavior of so many students from such varied tiack-grounds?

Despite heightened sensitivity and increased security, however, the schoolyard massacre has proven to be a remarkably durable and recur-ring social cataclysm.

There was the live footage of students fleeing in terror across the green, the boy with the bleeding head being dropped from the window, the SWAT teams moving in.

I work at getting the students to use their writing not just as a tool for making arguments, but also as a lens for exploring complexity and a vehicle for arriving at nuanced under­standings of a lived reality that is inescapably characterized by ambi­guities, shades of meaning. contradictions, and gaps.

He received his BA from St. John's Univer­sity, his MA from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh.