Review: ‘Sandy Hook’ is vital reading in the post-truth age

If you stand on a street corner all day yelling at passersby, you might reach a few hundred people. If you do the same thing on the internet, that number is comparatively limitless.

“Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for the Truth” is exactly what it purports to be, though the title couldn’t have prepared me for the level of schooling I was about to get.

Journalist Elizabeth Williamson’s new investigative piece is a bit longer than the news features you may be used to reading from her. “Sandy Hook” is split into almost 30 chapters, each one with as much care and integrity as the last.

Filled with the most impeccable details — the ones that rarely make it into tight news reports — Williamson draws on documented facts to paint pertinent portraits of the families and victims of the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. But only about a quarter of the book focuses on Sandy Hook and the people involved. The rest is about the internet and the fight for truth.

Williamson, a feature writer in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, waded through brackish swamps of misinformation, disinformation and trauma to arrive at a well documented explanation of a tragedy, receipts in hand and nicely organized in the book’s notes section.