A Safeway in Arizona

October 17, 2011
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 Loughner—22 years old, unemployed, and “obviously deranged”—killed 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 Arizona—its 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 “Loughner’s 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.

November 1, 2011
Investigative journalist and native Arizonian Zoellner (Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World, 2009, etc.) combines memoir, history and reportage in an attempt to understand mass murder and the attempted assassination of a friend in Tucson. The author notes he has truly loved few people in his life, but "Gabrielle had quietly come to be one of them." In January 2011, U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head outside a Safeway supermarket by Jared Lee Loughner. Six people died, and 18 were injured. Loughner alone was responsible for this carnage, but what was it about Arizona, and perhaps America, that facilitated his schizophrenic rampage? Zoellner finds this context in the fear and hatred that has engulfed Arizona. Always a place for self-reinvention, this was accompanied by a rootlessness culminating in endless tracks of suburban housing where neighbors isolated themselves in air-conditioned solitude. When economic hard times hit the state, isolation turned to unremitting anger. Latinos--though soon to be the majority population of the state--were suspect, and laws were passed to root out the illegals among them. Big government became a chimerical enemy, and hatred of it was fueled by politicians who found that extreme positions brought votes, and by talk radio with its "constant generation of low-grade outrage." When fellow citizens were viewed as potential predators, carrying a gun became a must, and one could buy guns and ammo as easily as a quart of milk--which is precisely what Loughner did. The gunman wandered alone, ignored or purposefully avoided, until he acted, taking from his environment shards of reality that led to mayhem. Zoellner brilliantly evokes the past and present of Arizona, the outsized personalities that have shaped the state and the paranoia lurking at the edge of society. A sure-to-be-controversial, troubling tale of the wages of fear on the body politic.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2011

Former Arizona Republic reporter Zoellner tries to make the case that Arizona's toxic sociopolitical culture, lack of mental health care, and generally maladaptive governance were responsible for schizophrenic Jared Loughner's attempt on the life of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. However, Zoellner's argument is colored by his personal friendship with both Giffords and fellow shooting victim Gabe Zimmerman; other reporters and analysts have shown that this tragedy could have happened anywhere. Zoellner interjects his personal story of growing up bored in the Tucson suburbs, an experience not necessarily unique to Arizona. His narrative is at times encumbered by mawkish prose (he twice refers to Giffords as a "wounded queen"). Some individual vignettes--particularly an interview with megalomaniacal Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio--are fascinating and do get to the heart of what is unique about Arizona's political climate. VERDICT Political junkies and supporters of gun control and those who liked Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? may seek this out. A more thorough examination of the state's politics, particularly its gun culture, anti-immigration sentiment, and boom-and-bust economy is still needed.--Kate Stewart, American Folklife Ctr., Washington, DC

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2012
The January 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others at a suburban Tucson shopping mall revealed many of the fault lines in Arizona's politics, economics, and culture. Journalist Zoellner, who grew up in Arizona, offers a compelling look at how the state has changed since its frontier days as air-conditioning made the desert more livable. He examines the particular political climate of Arizona, a gun-toting culture of political conservatism and the harshest anti-immigration law in the nation. In the aftermath of the shooting, which killed 6 and left 18 injured, a local sheriff publicly worried that it might have come as a result of vitriolic political rhetoric. That led to confusion and political animus, as some agreed, and others claimed threats to free speech. The shooting and its aftermath are part of a landscape of harsh political and economic realities in a state struggling with a housing-market bust, immigration and racial issues, and high accessibility to guns. As Arizona approaches its centennial, Zoellner argues passionately for greater civility in the Grand Canyon State.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)