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| After the Fall : New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years That Followed
ISBN: 9781595587671
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / New Press, The
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Social Science; History;
Every New Yorker has a story of the morning of September 11, and Columbia University's Oral History Research Office has made an admirable effort to collect a wide sampling. The editors present accounts of the attacks and their aftermath, conveying diverse stories "as they unfolded in an extraordinary moment." The most affecting stories in this diligent oral history convey the immediacy and horror of the scene around the World Trade Center towers. Accounts from paramedics wading into the inferno and office workers evacuated moments before the buildings' collapse go deep into the essence of surviving amid chaos. "You hear this terrible roaring sound," said ambulance driver James Dobson, "And all you hear are these explosions, and everything got black," while the terrified passengers in his vehicle passed a respirator around to survive, breath by breath. Across the city, Muslim teacher Debbie Almontaser struggled to calm her fifth-grade pupils as terrified parents collected them one by one. As it became clear that the attackers were Muslim, she worried about wearing her headscarf and turned later to community outreach efforts as dozens of Arab men were detained, while her oldest son served in a National Guard unit sorting through body parts in the scorched rubble. The patchwork quality hints at the scale of confusion on September 11 itself, and the numberless ways in which those experiences rippled though the city, the nation, and the world. Ten years on, the power of these stories endures. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Mary Marshall Clark is director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office and a past president of the Oral History Association.Peter Bearman is the Cole Professor of the Social Sciences at Columbia University. He is the author of Doormen and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. They both live in New York City.Catherine Ellis is a contributing producer with American RadioWorks, the documentary unit of American Public Media. She is founder of Audio Memoir, which chronicles personal stories for families and organizations. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.Stephen Drury Smith is the executive editor and host of American RadioWorks® and is the winner of the DuPont-Columbia University Gold Baton. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. |
