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

Quotes

• “Writer and fifth-generation Arizonan Zoellner seeks ‘to make sense of a fundamentally baffling event’…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.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “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.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

• “Tom Zoellner’s remarkable book about a moment of tragedy in Arizona ends up a story of survival—a wounded congresswoman’s survival, and a wounded nation’s survival as well.”

  — Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America

• “This is a remarkable book. It was deeply reported before Tom Zoellner could have known he would write it. It was deeply reported after the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords made it absolutely necessary for him to write. Zoellner’s long, intense relationships with his two main subjects—Giffords and the state of Arizona—give enormous authority to his storytelling. Unsentimental but driven by powerful emotion, the book makes crisp, riveting, expansive sense of a tragedy that was far more than a random massacre by a madman.”

  — William Finnegan, author of Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country

• “A compelling cry from the heart, this poignant book mixes an intimate personal story with painstaking journalism and in doing so draws meaning from a terrifying attempt at political assassination. A Safeway in Arizona reveals the life-and-death consequences of alienation in an asphalt desert, and it makes a simple, forceful appeal: give a damn about your neighbor.”

  — Michael Downs, author of House of Good Hope

• “Tom Zoellner brilliantly captures the slow death of Tucson and how one disturbed young man trapped in this emptiness shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and wounded and killed other people. This is a tale created by greed in the Southwest, and written in blood.”

  — Charles Bowden, author of Down by the River