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

"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." Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Tom Zoellner is the author of Uranium:War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, winner of the 2010 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire, and co-author of An Ordinary Man. He has worked as a reporter for The Arizona Republic and San Francisco Chronicle.