New Yorkers remember 9/11 in this landmark volume of oral history commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attacks—A “staggering book of living memory” (Booklist, starred review). Within days of September 11, 2001, Columbia’s Oral History Research Office deployed interviewers across the city to collect the accounts and observations of hundreds of people from a diverse mix of New York neighborhoods and backgrounds. With follow-up interviews spanning years, the project produced a deep and revealing look at how the attacks changed individual lives and communities in New York City. After the Fall presents a selection of these fascinating testimonies, with heartbreaking and enlightening stories from a broad range of New Yorkers. The interviews include first-responders, taxi drivers, school teachers, artists, religious leaders, immigrants, and others who were interviewed numerous times since the 2001 attacks. The result is a remarkable time-lapse account of the city as it changed in the wake of 9/11, one that will resonate powerfully with New Yorkers and millions of others who continue to feel the impact of the most damaging foreign attack to ever occur inside the United States.

After the Fall A common refrain heard since the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001 is that “everything has changed.” After the Fall presents a timely and provocative examination of the impact and implications of 9/11 and the war on terror on American culture and literature. Author Richard Gray – widely regarded as the leading European scholar in American literature – reveals the widespread belief among novelists, dramatists, and poets – as well as the American public at large – that in the post-9/11 world they are all somehow living “after the fall.” He carefully considers how many writers, faced with what they see as the end of their world, have retreated into the seductive pieties of home, hearth, and family; and how their works are informed by the equally seductive myth of American exceptionalism. As a counterbalance, Gray also discusses in depth the many writings that “get it right” – transnational and genuinely crossbred works that resist the oppositional and simplistic “us and them” / “Christian and Muslim” language that has dominated mainstream commentary. These imaginative works, Gray believes, choose instead to respond to the heterogeneous character of the United States, as well as its necessary positioning in a transnational context. After the Fall offers illuminating insights into the relationships of such issues as nationalism, trauma, culture, and literature during a time of profound crisis.

“Better and more comprehensive than any prior account. . . . Those of us who lived through those days will find the book cathartic; those rising generations who were too young to remember 9/11, or who weren’t yet born, will find it revelatory.” — John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and author of The Ground Truth “With his rigorous research and moral clarity, Mitchell Zuckoff has provided us with an invaluable service. He has deepened our understanding of what happened on 9/11 and recorded the voices of the victims and the survivors. What’s more, he has ensured that we never forget.” —David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon Years in the making, this spellbinding, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting narrative is an unforgettable portrait of 9/11. This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerizing, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day. In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote about the attacks, the victims, and their families. After further years of meticulous reporting, Zuckoff has filled Fall and Rise with voices of the lost and the saved. The result is an utterly gripping book, filled with intimate stories of people most affected by the events of that sunny Tuesday in September: an out-of-work actor stuck in an elevator in the North Tower of the World Trade Center; the heroes aboard Flight 93 deciding to take action; a veteran trapped in the inferno in the Pentagon; the fire chief among the first on the scene in sleepy Shanksville; a team of firefighters racing to save an injured woman and themselves; and the men, women, and children flying across country to see loved ones or for work who suddenly faced terrorists bent on murder. Fall and Rise will open new avenues of understanding for everyone who thinks they know the story of 9/11, bringing to life—and in some cases, bringing back to life—the extraordinary ordinary people who experienced the worst day in modern American history. Destined to be a classic, Fall and Rise will move, shock, inspire, and fill hearts with love and admiration for the human spirit as it triumphs in the face of horrifying events.

From award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes comes a powerful novel set fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks in a classroom of students who cannot remember the event but live through the aftermath of its cultural shift. When her fifth-grade teacher hints that a series of lessons about home and community will culminate with one big answer about two tall towers once visible outside their classroom window, Dèja can't help but feel confused. She sets off on a journey of discovery, with new friends Ben and Sabeen by her side. But just as she gets closer to answering big questions about who she is, what America means, and how communities can grow (and heal), she uncovers new questions, too. Like, why does Pop get so angry when she brings up anything about the towers? Award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes tells a powerful story about young people who weren't alive to witness this defining moment in history, but begin to realize how much it colors their every day.

On the morning of September 11 2001 Pasquale Buzzelli was working on the 64th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. His wife Louise was at home, seven months pregnant with their first child. She was woken that morning by a call from Pasquale who asked her to put on the television as his building was on fire. As Louise watched in horror, the events of 9/11 unfolded over the next few hours. Pasquale called her again and told her he was about to evacuate the building but, just minutes later, Louise watched as the North Tower collapsed with Pasquale still inside. She was sure she had watched her husband and father of her unborn child die in front of her eyes... Pasquale was in the middle of evacuating and reached the stairwell on the 22nd floor when the North Tower collapsed. He remembers thinking "this is how Im going to die" as he fell with the building. Miraculously, he survived the fall and awoke three hours later perched on a pile of rubble on a concrete slab 4ft by 4ft sticking out over a huge 60ft drop. Eventually, firemen managed to get him down and he was taken to the hospital. Louise was at home being consoled by family and friends, still thinking he was dead, until late that afternoon, when the phone rang, and it was him on the other line! Pasquale was one of only 16 people to have survived the collapse of the North Tower. Although Pasquale escaped with bruising and a fractured foot, virtually unscathed, the mental scars took a lot longer to heal. In the months after 9/11 Pasquale found it hard to come to terms with what happened that he had survived and his friends and colleagues had not. He became distant from his wife and newly born baby as the guilt made it impossible for him to be happy. At the same time Louise was experiencing her own PTSD. As joyous as she was to find out her husband survived, she equally felt pain and sorrow for those whose husbands were not as fortunate. Stories in the press would show widows and babies of men who had died in the attacks. "It is hard to imagine the pain they suffered and the strength they needed to carry out their pregnancy." Louise wrote A Song for Hope (named after their newborn daughter) and the money from the sale of the CD was shared among the widows and their babies born after 9/11. 'We All Fall Down: The True Story of the 9/11 Surfer' is the story of how Pasquale dealt with the horrific events of 9/11, with the PTSD and survivor guilt that followed, and ultimately with his road to recovery. For Pasquale, 9/11 will always be with him and he thinks about it every day but now, 10 years on, he has realised the best way to respect the memory of those who died, he needs to live for his life again ... "I could not control what had happened to me but now I can control how I would lead my life. How I would be the father and husband that my family deserved and to help and respect my fellow man as I was taught to do by my father".

Falling After 9/11 investigates the connections between violence, trauma, and aesthetics by exploring post 9/11 figures of falling in art and literature. From the perspective of trauma theory, Aimee Pozorski provides close readings of figures of falling in such exemplary American texts as Don DeLillo's novel, Falling Man, Diane Seuss's poem, "Falling Man," Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Frédéric Briegbeder's Windows on the World, and Richard Drew's famous photograph of the man falling from the World Trade Center. Falling After 9/11 argues that the apparent failure of these texts to register fully the trauma of the day in fact points to a larger problem in the national tradition: the problem of reference-of how to refer to falling-in the 21st century and beyond.

Features a compilation of polls taken by the Gallup Organization. This title offers commentary and analysis, placing topics in a readable, historical context.

The presidency of George W. Bush has led to the worst foreign policy decision in the history of the United States -- the bloody, unwinnable war in Iraq. How did this happen? Bush's fateful decision was rooted in events that began decades ago, and until now this story has never been fully told. From Craig Unger, the author of the bestseller House of Bush, House of Saud, comes a comprehensive, deeply sourced, and chilling account of the secret relationship between neoconservative policy makers and the Christian Right, and how they assaulted the most vital safeguards of America's constitutional democracy while pushing the country into the catastrophic quagmire in the Middle East that is getting worse day by day. Among the powerful revelations in this book: Why George W. Bush ignored the sage advice of his father, George H.W. Bush, and took America into war. How Bush was convinced he was doing God's will. How Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated George W. Bush, disabled his enemies within the administration, and relentlessly pressed for an attack on Iraq. Which veteran government official, with the assent of the president's father, protested passionately that the Bush administration was making a catastrophic mistake -- and was ignored. How information from forged documents that had already been discredited fourteen times by various intelligence agencies found its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in which he made the case for war with Iraq. How Cheney and the neocons assembled a shadow national security apparatus and created a disinformation pipeline to mislead America and start the war. A seasoned, award-winning investigative reporter connected to many back-channel political and intelligence sources, Craig Unger knows how to get the big story -- and this one is his most explosive yet. Through scores of interviews with figures in the Christian Right, the neoconservative movement, the Bush administration, and sources close to the Bush family, as well as intelligence agents in the CIA, the Pentagon, and Israel, Unger shows how the Bush administration's certainty that it could bend history to its will has carried America into the disastrous war in Iraq, dooming Bush's presidency to failure and costing America thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Far from ensuring our security, the Iraq War will be seen as a great strategic pivot point in history that could ignite wider war in the Middle East, particularly in Iran. Provocative, timely, and disturbing, The Fall of the House of Bush stands as the most comprehensive and dramatic account of how and why George W. Bush took America to war in Iraq.

How does literature matter politically in the 21st century? This book offers an ecocritical framework for exploring the significance of literature today. Featuring a diverse body of texts and authors, it develops a future-oriented politics embedded in those transgressive realities which our political system finds impossible to tame. This book re-imagines political agency, voices, bodies and borders as transformative processes rather than rigid realities, articulating a ‘dia-topian’ literary politics. Taking a contextual approach, it addresses such urgent global issues as biopolitics, migration and borders, populism, climate change, and terrorism. These readings revitalize fictional worlds for political enquiry, demonstrating how imaginative literature seeds change in a world of closed-off horizons. Prior to the pragmatics of power-play, literary language breathes new energy into the frames of our thought and the shapes of our affects. This book shows how relation, metamorphosis and enmeshment can become salient in a politics beyond the conflict line.

The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism offers readers a fresh, insightful overview to all genres of postmodern writing. Drawing on a variety of works from not only mainstream authors but also those that are arguably unconventional, renowned scholar Linda Wagner-Martin gives the reader a solid framework and foundation to reading, understanding, and appreciating postmodern literature since its inception through the present day.