Reviews for September 11: An Oral History

The average rating for September 11: An Oral History based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-05-02 00:00:00 Tomoharu Kimura My 2002 S.F. Chronicle review: We all did a lot of forgetting last fall. There was simply no other way. Days or weeks or even months of immersion in the shock of Sept. 11 had to give way, eventually, to turning away from that inner pain and bewilderment so many of us felt. Now it's time to turn back. We all have to decide how -- and what - - we want to remember. The huge crop of books now being published about the Sept. 11 attacks -- four of which are considered here -- serve to reproduce that sickening sense of disbelief and incapacity that swept us away a year ago. Even those of us who spent days glued to CNN last September may not have known, for example, that probably the single most powerful image from Sept. 11 has a ghoulish subtext: the dozens of forms seen leaping to sure death from the upper reaches of the twin towers, suspended in air for a few terrifying seconds, include one who smashed into a firefighter on the ground, leaving both dead. Is that a detail too terrible to know? Are eyewitness accounts of the horrific scene that day in World Trade Center Plaza also too terrible? Do we really need to read, for example, about a 10-yard-long pool of blood, or a body impaled on a pole after the long fall from above, or a severed hand that seems to be waving to a rescue worker racing past? Do we really need to hear so many descriptions of the hijacked jetliners' engines being gunned, just before impact, that it's almost unavoidable to sit bolt upright in bed at night, the sound seemingly echoing in your ears? Perhaps not. But a year later, two things seem clear about Sept. 11. One, it was first and foremost a personal drama, lived directly by many thousands of people, indirectly by many millions more; it was a global tragedy that is real only in the context of how each person lived it -- or did not get to live it, not all of it, anyway. Two, any wisdom we can gain, collectively, about what it all meant, or what it tells us about the U.S. role in the world, depends on seeing it, first and always, as an overlay of all these personal stories, even if they are often quite disturbing. It's possible to recoil in disgust at the tawdry overkill sure to characterize anniversary media coverage without letting it become numbing -- possible, but not easy. But one thing that is not possible is to sanitize the obscenity of the attacks. Honest people can disagree about how to remember Sept. 11, but if we try to shield ourselves from the palpable horror it represented, we are not remembering it -- only glancing backward down a media hall of mirrors that tells us nothing about ourselves or the day itself. Only by retaining a sense of just how bad that day got for so many people can we heed the encouraging glimpse it provided of a basic decency in just about everyone involved that day. The role of rescue workers has been widely and justly celebrated, and many of us will do our best to keep in mind that awe and appreciation every time we come across a firefighter or cop for the rest of our lives. But the men and women in those roles already knew their job was to rescue and, often, to be heroes. Perhaps even more astonishing are the many, many people who reacted to the crisis with selflessness and generosity. Those good qualities are best remembered in the context of panic and terror. "I saw firefighters and FBI people," a World Trade Center employee named Roselyn Braud tells us in September 11: An Oral History by Dean E. Murphy (Doubleday; 272 pages; $22.95), describing the scene in the shopping concourse below the towers. " 'Get out of here,' they were yelling. 'Run for your lives! Run for your lives!' People were crawling on the floor of the shopping concourse, fighting to get up the stairs at the Borders bookstore. No one was helping anyone. The strongest survived. People were climbing over each other." Yet again and again, dazed people stumbling through the darkness -- especially in the dust typhoons that descended when each of the towers fell -- were helped by strangers, pulled toward safety, given a towel to breathe through, water, soothing words, whatever was needed. Rick Rescorla, Morgan Stanley's vice president for security, actually sang to keep people calm as he herded them out of the building -- a detail that might seem unbelievable if a writer of James B. Stewart's caliber had not chosen to tell us Rescorla's life story in The Heart of a Soldier (Simon & Schuster; 307 pages; $24). Rescorla fought in Vietnam, even though he was a British citizen at the time, and proved himself then as a true hero and a remarkable man -- long before he went back for one last sweep on Sept. 11, after all his company's employees were cleared out, sacrificing his own life. Stewart ("Blood Sport") brings Rescorla's story alive so vividly and thoroughly, it's only a matter of time before a Rescorla film hits the big screen (the Mel Gibson character in "We Were Soldiers" was based in part on Rescorla). His story deserves that and more -- Rescorla and his best friend accurately identified the threat of terrorism against the World Trade Center and warned the authorities; Rescorla's best friend, Thomas Hill, also an imaginative military tactician, even went to great lengths to put together a detailed, credible plan to assassinate Osama bin Laden. Repeated meetings with interested FBI agents ultimately led to disappointment, however. That's no huge surprise, of course, but the tale of Hill's and Rescorla's warnings does eerily sum up that at least to some experts, Sept. 11 was not the shock it was to most of us. Richard Bernstein's superbly written overall chronicle of the events leading up to Sept. 11, Out of the Blue: A Narrative of September 11, 2001 (Henry Holt; 320 pages; $25), draws on the reporting of the entire New York Times staff to bring alive the background with a subtlety and mastery that could almost make Sept. 11 seem unsurprising. Noting that bin Laden -- and most of the Sept. 11 hijackers -- were all originally from Saudi Arabia, he writes: "The belief of many American officials is that Saudi Arabia actually encouraged its disaffected young men to join the jihadists abroad as a way of deflecting attention away from problems of corruption, dictatorship, nepotism, and poverty inside the country." But as important as it is to look rationally at the why of what happened, from the perspective of one year later, it still seems as though what Sept. 11 will probably convey for years to come is a shorthand evocation of utter shock, along with questions about how we or anyone respond in the face of such shock. "I said to a cop in a car, 'What's the most direct way to get to Park Avenue South?' " L.A. Times reporter Geraldine Baum recounts in Running Toward Danger: Stories Behind the Breaking News of 9/11 by the Newseum with Cathi Trost and Alicia C. Shepard (Rowman & Littlefield; 256 pages; $29.95). "He asked, 'You want a ride?' I got in the back of the cruiser. He blurted out, 'We lost the day tour. We lost our whole day tour.' And he started to cry. He took me right to the office. . . . I asked, 'What shall I do tomorrow?' Dean Baquet, managing editor in L.A., was on a speakerphone. Dean said, 'Focus in, Geraldine. Do one precinct.' That was a really good idea." Focusing in may still make a lot of sense. We as a country are still coming to terms with the riddle of how to respond, both in the sense of how we see ourselves and how we mobilize U.S. power around the world. It may be that lessons about our basic humanity remain unlearned, buried under the debris of all we experienced in the Sept. 11 aftermath, and we need to do some digging to reclaim them. This article appeared on page RV - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-06 00:00:00 Vonney Lancaster I was young when 9/11 happened but I will never forget that day. I remember my mother coming home in the late afternoon absolutely covered in dust, screaming and crying and screaming and I was so confused (having been in detention that day and not fully registering what had happened). I remember sneaking into the back bedroom and turning on the TV to watch Batman Beyond after school and just seeing those buildings. I remember my mother many years later attempting to explain to me what she saw (she was 5 blocks away) and describing the dust and smoke and screams and smacks of impact on pavement by NY jumpers before ultimately breaking down...it was a lot. And it was life changing for me, as we soon moved further and further west, all the way to AZ. As a result my mother still deals with panic attacks and our family has pretty much remembered not to mention that date or turn on the TV on the 11th. I try not to think about it at all. That is what made the decision to pick up this book interesting to me. It took me over 4 months to read off and on, as I kept picking it up and then losing the urge to continue. I felt that it would bring back bad personal memories, but would be deep, moving, and from the words of the people who lived it. Those whose lives were affected just as mine was. Those profiled were diverse and included everyone from people trying desperately to find a way home in complete and utter terror to the paramedics who were setting up triads 200 yards from the base of the Towers before they collapsed; from the ordinary citizens who tried to get on with their lives in the days following to the many more who held out hope that their family member or friend had survived, only to find out the truth in heartbreaking fashion. Be warned, the book is graphic. Scenes of death are described, and much like the event they are harrowing and will make your stomach churn. Much like the tragedy this book is raw and heartbreaking. It is also extremely powerful. I almost feel inappropriate writing a review on this; it is as I feel I'm almost not entitled to speak on it. However it's a part of history and my own life as well, and a sobering reminder to me of life, and how that should be remembered, while celebrating and bringing joy to those with us.