September 11: An Oral History

Everyone has a story to tell about where they were when they first learned of the September 11 attacks. New York Times reporter Dean Murphy has gathered together first-person accounts of people working in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as well as rescue workers and eyewitnesses. And while the magnitude of what happened that day is still hard to grasp no matter how many times one sees news footage of the tower's collapse, Murphy's technique brings the reader closer to understanding what it meant to the people who lived through it. The detail with which the interviewed subjects discuss what they went through is astonishing: a high-school student a block away is told to keep practicing the cha-cha while the towers collapse; a woman saves her own life by defying her coworkers pleadings to stay in the office and await further instructions; an office worker forgets to grind his coffee the night before and, as a result, is late enough to avoid certain death. While the stories mount, one human being after another witnessing unspeakable horror, the effect is not unlike walking along the Washington, D.C., Vietnam War Memorial: all that personal information, all those names, all that loss. But as good memorials do, it jolts the observer into a deeper, more personal understanding of human events. --John Moe