Reference Reviews

Reference for Students

The Oklahoma City Bombings. By Richard Brownell. Detroit, Mich.: Lucent Books Thomson Gale, 2007. 1 vol. 104 p. $31.20. ISBN 10: 1-59018-843-8; ISBN 13: 978-1-59018-843-9.

Two events, the attack on Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge and the siege on the Branch Davidians at Waco, are cited as setting the stage for more aggressive actions by government separatists in the U.S. and particularly Timothy McVeigh. The enormity of the bombing is given in the sidebar statistics "By the numbers" of persons killed and injured, children orphaned, and the oldest and youngest casualties, the financial costs to the city from the bombing, the cost of the investigation and of McVeigh’s defense and the cost of the materials to make the bomb. If students are assigned reports on terrorism, this will be a good start for a middle school student or a slower reader in high school.