Current Affairs


Sunday, February 5, 2012

A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us about the Grand Canyon State and Life in America

By Tom Zoellner
"Writer and fifth-generation Arizonan Zoellner (Uranium) seeks to make sense of a fundamentally baffling event in this rambling examination of the January 8, 2011, shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Jared Lee Loughner22 years old, unemployed, and obviously derangedkilled six people and wounded 13, including Giffords, when he opened fire at a political meet and greet at a Tucson Safeway. Concluding that events never happen in a vacuum, the author searches for clues to the tragedy in the context in which the shooting took place. He finds his answers in the dysfunctional social and political culture of Arizonaits isolation, misplaced paranoia about immigration, gun laws, the withering of its mental health care system, absent leadership, and the partisan nastiness of politics and talk radio. Even while conceding that there is only one responsible party for the tragedy and that he is gravely mentally ill, Zoellner concludes that Loughners feelings of existential helplessness were a distorted amplification of what surrounded him that year in Arizona. Zoellner, a personal friend of Giffords, admits that this is not a work of objective journalism, and his subjective rendering of Arizona proves problematic, as is his effort to connect the dots between cause and effect."  (Publisher Weekly)  Check Our Catalog

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