So, I haven’t read a single one of the books listed below.
But, they make up my 9/11 reading list.
I need to add some fiction.
On Friday, the Globe’s Mark Feeney commented on 9/11
and the arts.
There have been photography collections (Joel Meyerowitz’s “Aftermath’’), a television series (“Rescue Me’’), films (“Flight 93,’’ “World Trade Center’’), novels (Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man,’’ Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland’’), popular songs (Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising,’’ Paul McCartney’s “Freedom’’), even a Pulitzer Prize-winning classical music piece (John Adams’s “On the Transmigration of Souls’’)…Yet considering the impact of Sept. 11 in other realms - political, diplomatic, economic - what’s surprising is that the list isn’t longer. It may be even more striking that no Sept. 11-inspired work has seized the popular or critical imagination in any sort of outsized way. Certainly, there have been no Sept. 11 counterparts to Erich Maria Remarque’s novel “All Quiet on the Western Front,’’ Picasso’s painting “Guernica,’’ Shostakovich’s “Leningrad’’ Symphony, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.’’
There have been photography collections (Joel Meyerowitz’s “Aftermath’’), a television series (“Rescue Me’’), films (“Flight 93,’’ “World Trade Center’’), novels (Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man,’’ Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland’’), popular songs (Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising,’’ Paul McCartney’s “Freedom’’), even a Pulitzer Prize-winning classical music piece (John Adams’s “On the Transmigration of Souls’’)…Yet considering the impact of Sept. 11 in other realms - political, diplomatic, economic - what’s surprising is that the list isn’t longer. It may be even more striking that no Sept. 11-inspired work has seized the popular or critical imagination in any sort of outsized way. Certainly, there have been no Sept. 11 counterparts to Erich Maria Remarque’s novel “All Quiet on the Western Front,’’ Picasso’s painting “Guernica,’’ Shostakovich’s “Leningrad’’ Symphony, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.’’
In the
aftermath of Sept. 11, people everywhere did what people do in disaster’s fresh
wake: We wept, prayed, raged, cowered, gathered, hid, drank, questioned,
comforted and sought comfort. We also saved things, often little things, and
often for reasons just beyond the full grasp of articulation. Now, a decade
later, many of us still keep these mundane items, which timing and circumstance
have forged into artifacts approaching the sacred. They return us instantly to
a moment we have no desire to revisit, but are determined not to forget. They
are our Sept. 11 relics.
The footlong
shred of a T-shirt that Susan Horn keeps in her bedroom drawer in Scarsdale,
N.Y., as a reminder of a stranger’s selflessness. The jar of multicolored wax
bits, remnants of the McLaughlin family’s front-porch candlelight vigil in
Brewster, N.Y. The silver-framed calendar of the Rev. Paul Fromberg, an
Episcopal priest in San Francisco, its page fixed on September 2001. The photo
identification card kept in the wallet of Stacy Scherf Dieterlen, a temporary
worker who fled the south tower’s 101st floor while some of her colleagues
hesitated, and died.
---------
From Harvard
Book Store :
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to9/11
Lawrence Wright
A gripping narrative that spans five decades, The
Looming Tower explains in unprecedented detail the growth of Islamic
fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that
culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Lawrence Wright re-creates
firsthand the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from
incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of the most
successful terrorist group in history. He follows FBI counterterrorism chief
John O’Neill as he uncovers the emerging danger from al-Qaeda in the 1990s and
struggles to track this new threat. Packed with new information and a deep
historical perspective
Anthony Shadid went to war in Iraq, but not as an embedded
journalist. Born and raised in Oklahoma, of Lebanese descent, Shadid, a fluent
Arabic speaker, has spent the last three years dividing his time between
Washington, D.C., and Baghdad. The only journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for
his extraordinary coverage of Iraq, Shadid is also the only writer to describe
the human story of ordinary Iraqis weathering the unexpected impact of
America's invasion and occupation.
The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban
(Paperback)
By Sarah Chayes
As a former star reporter for NPR, Sarah Chayes developed a
devoted listenership for her on-site reports on conflicts around the world. In The
Punishment of Virtue, she reveals the misguided U.S. policy in Afghanistan
in the wake of the defeat of the Taliban, which has severely undermined the
effort to build democracy and allowed corrupt tribal warlords back into positions
of power and the Taliban to re-infiltrate the country.
Seeds of Terror: How Drugs, Thugs, and Crime Are Reshaping the
Afghan War (Paperback)
Seeds of Terror is a groundbreaking triumph of
reporting, a book that changed U.S. policy toward the Afghan heroin trade and
the fight against terror. In it, Gretchen Peters exposes the deepening
relationship between the Taliban and drug traffickers, and traces decades of
America's failure to disrupt the opium production that helps fund extremism.
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