A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us about the Grand Canyon State and Life in America by Tom Zoellner; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator William Hughes

A riveting account of the state of Arizona, seen through the lens of the Tucson shootings

On January 8, 2011, twenty-two-year-old Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a Tucson meet and greet held by US representative Gabrielle Giffords. The incident left six people dead and thirteen injured, including Giffords, whom he shot in the head.

Award-winning author and fifth-generation Arizonan Tom Zoellner, a longtime friend of Giffords’ and a field organizer on her congressional campaign, uses the tragedy as a jumping-off point to expose the fault lines in Arizona’s political and socioeconomic landscape that allowed this to happen: the harmful political rhetoric, the inept state government, the lingering effects of the housing market’s boom and bust, the proliferation and accessibility of guns, the lack of established communities, and the hysteria surrounding issues of race and immigration.

Zoellner offers a revealing portrait of the southwestern state at a critical moment in history—and as a symbol of the nation’s discontents and uncertainties. Ultimately, it is his rallying cry for a saner, more civil way of life.

“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

“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

“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

“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

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 coauthor of the New York Times bestseller An Ordinary Man. He has worked as a reporter for the Arizona Republic and San Francisco Chronicle.