Going Postal by Mark Ames
Last week a lady in London thrust a book into my hand and said I had to read it - “It’s incredibly topical,” she said. It was Going Postal by Mark Ames - a book released last year in North America and now published in the UK too.
I didn’t take much notice until I finally picked up the book last night. The book explains the phenomenon of so-called ‘rage killings’ in schools and workplaces of the United States. After finishing the opening chapter, I realised why this book is being recommended by so many people at the moment. Mark Ames has some thoughts on the Virginia Tech tragedy here.
I wonder what people who were reading Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes were thinking last week when they heard about the shootings. Nineteen Minutes recounts the story of a teenage gunman killing fellow school children in a high school shooting.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Hi Richard
I’ve read neither Mark Ames nor Jodi Picoult (although she was interviewed today on BBC Radio’s “Woman’s Hour”) but the killings did recall Lionel Shriver’s “We Need To Talk About Kevin”. This novel was red hot news in Britain a bare 12 months ago but no-one else seems to remember. This is part of the trouble: The book is more than glossy entertainment and should be treated as a serious indictment of what keeps happening in every sphere of life throughout the world.