T.E. W. (terez93) reviewed Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 on + 323 more book reviews
Composed by award-winning journalist and author Garrett Graff, this comprehensive, heartbreaking yet inspiring narrative seamlessly weaves together untold disparate accounts of the unprecedented events which occurred on 9/11, from the many unique perspectives of the people who survived that terrible day - and from the friends and loved ones of the many who didn't. As the author notes, much has been written about this, yet another, day of infamy, in American history, but rarely from the perspective of the people who lived it.
Drawing from an impressive number of sources (there is a plethora of notes and citations, another rarity for a book of this type), the author recounts the story of that tragic day, beginning the day prior. He exhaustively incorporates information from transcripts, declassified documents, and, primarily, original interviews from nearly five hundred persons, including witnesses and survivors, friends and family members of the victims, and many high-ranking government officials, including even Laura Bush, Donald Rumsfield, the US Defense Secretary at the time, who narrowly escaped the attack on the Pentagon, and first responders, many of whom were trapped in the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center towers, seemingly all of whom lost colleagues that day.
This insightful and poignant book does an admirable job of painting a portrait of the events on 9/11, but a word of caution - it may be traumatic to anyone who witnessed the events, or worse, lost someone in the attacks. The book is organized into 64 chapters, moving mostly temporally, through the events of the day, highlighting the confusion and chaos something of this magnitude wrought on a largely-unprepared nation. It's a very revealing look at something of a lost world which largely doesn't exist anymore: the pre-9/11 world fewer and fewer of us really remember.
There are few days in American history which have had such an impact on our collective psyche: Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and perhaps, on a smaller scale, the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, which was really the first of its kind, in the modern era, with a tragic number to follow in its wake: all these events are household names which need no explanation. However, I would argue that the experience of 9/11 was decidedly different. For the first time in world history, really, nearly everyone in the US, and untold millions of others around the world, witnessed a life-altering, world-changing, event -an act of war, really - firsthand, even if only on TV, in real time, together, all sharing in the horror of the same event.
This wasn't something heard about after the fact, the aftermath viewed by the public via only a few grainy, black-and-white newspaper images like the attack on Pearl Harbor, or a few still photographs as with the JFK assassination, until years later, when the Zapruder film was released. Literally billions of people around the world witnessed the attacks in real time, collectively, as they occurred: the second plane striking the South Tower, live, on morning news; the real-time collapse of both towers, which killed untold thousands from nearly a hundred nations; and the jumpers, those who chose to take fate into their own hands, falling from the melting towers... all witnessed as it happened. And then there were the thousands of planes still in the sky, whose passengers in limbo all had friends and loved ones on the grounds, all wondering if theirs was next, waiting to hear whether their relatives, friends, colleagues, were the next to die. Never has an event touched so many at the same time on such a global scale. It's something that nearly everyone in their late-20s and upward remembers. It's another "Where Were You" event which almost everyone still recalls.
I don't have a personal connection to these events, or even to New York City, other than I remember that when traveling to Europe as a seventeen-year-old, and flying into Kennedy airport en route to London, the only structures I could then identify of the Manhattan skyline were the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers. I remember thinking how astonishing it was that humans could build such things: they literally towered over ALL of the other structures in the city. They really were the defining feature of the city's world-famous skyline. That was the first and last time I saw them in person - ironically, it was from the air.
Being of that generation, I also remember where I was when this event occurred. Living in California, there was a three-hour time difference. I was staying with my mother at the time, and I remember that she awakened me at about 7 AM, as she was getting ready for work, on that Tuesday morning, saying something about a "terrorist attack" in New York City. The first thing you think is "nuclear," and when I turned on the TV, that's definitely what I initially thought. I remembered the 1993 bombing, and knew that no one single device could do this otherwise. No one could initially conceive that it was due to hijacked commercial air liners being flown into buildings - other than Tom Clancy, I suppose. I had also read "Debt of Honor" in my early 20s, but that was inconceivable at the moment, until later when I saw the video.
I could see little but a blanket of white that looked almost like a fog bank encompassing nearly all of lower Manhattan, until I realized that one of the towers had fallen, but I still didn't know why. I remember sitting there for about thirty seconds, and then seeing in real time the second tower, the North tower, fall. The survivors in the book do a far better job of describing it than I can. More than twenty years later, a generation now passed, I still can't really describe in words what that was like. I called my dad, when I could again form rational thought, and he didn't know anything about it. He hadn't turned on the TV or heard on the radio, so I told him to turn on the TV.
The first time I visited the site was only a few weeks after the memorial had opened, in September, 2011 (the kickoff weekend of the Occupy movement!). I was attending a conference at Fordham University, and on my last day in New York I managed to get an entrance pass to the site, only recently opened to the general public, which was obviously under heavy security at the time. That was likewise a surreal moment. The new tower was still under construction, as was the museum which is now at the site, but much of the memorial had been constructed. Today, 11 years later, it's something of an open-air park, so it's easier to access. It's something everyone should make an effort to visit at least once in their lifetime, especially the generations which don't remember 9/11 personally, so that this event doesn't fade into history. To that end, it's also worthwhile to read this and other books before you go. That way, you will recognize many of the names on the memorial, which makes them more than just names, creating a personal connection even if you didn't experience this tragic day yourself.
Drawing from an impressive number of sources (there is a plethora of notes and citations, another rarity for a book of this type), the author recounts the story of that tragic day, beginning the day prior. He exhaustively incorporates information from transcripts, declassified documents, and, primarily, original interviews from nearly five hundred persons, including witnesses and survivors, friends and family members of the victims, and many high-ranking government officials, including even Laura Bush, Donald Rumsfield, the US Defense Secretary at the time, who narrowly escaped the attack on the Pentagon, and first responders, many of whom were trapped in the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center towers, seemingly all of whom lost colleagues that day.
This insightful and poignant book does an admirable job of painting a portrait of the events on 9/11, but a word of caution - it may be traumatic to anyone who witnessed the events, or worse, lost someone in the attacks. The book is organized into 64 chapters, moving mostly temporally, through the events of the day, highlighting the confusion and chaos something of this magnitude wrought on a largely-unprepared nation. It's a very revealing look at something of a lost world which largely doesn't exist anymore: the pre-9/11 world fewer and fewer of us really remember.
There are few days in American history which have had such an impact on our collective psyche: Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and perhaps, on a smaller scale, the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, which was really the first of its kind, in the modern era, with a tragic number to follow in its wake: all these events are household names which need no explanation. However, I would argue that the experience of 9/11 was decidedly different. For the first time in world history, really, nearly everyone in the US, and untold millions of others around the world, witnessed a life-altering, world-changing, event -an act of war, really - firsthand, even if only on TV, in real time, together, all sharing in the horror of the same event.
This wasn't something heard about after the fact, the aftermath viewed by the public via only a few grainy, black-and-white newspaper images like the attack on Pearl Harbor, or a few still photographs as with the JFK assassination, until years later, when the Zapruder film was released. Literally billions of people around the world witnessed the attacks in real time, collectively, as they occurred: the second plane striking the South Tower, live, on morning news; the real-time collapse of both towers, which killed untold thousands from nearly a hundred nations; and the jumpers, those who chose to take fate into their own hands, falling from the melting towers... all witnessed as it happened. And then there were the thousands of planes still in the sky, whose passengers in limbo all had friends and loved ones on the grounds, all wondering if theirs was next, waiting to hear whether their relatives, friends, colleagues, were the next to die. Never has an event touched so many at the same time on such a global scale. It's something that nearly everyone in their late-20s and upward remembers. It's another "Where Were You" event which almost everyone still recalls.
I don't have a personal connection to these events, or even to New York City, other than I remember that when traveling to Europe as a seventeen-year-old, and flying into Kennedy airport en route to London, the only structures I could then identify of the Manhattan skyline were the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers. I remember thinking how astonishing it was that humans could build such things: they literally towered over ALL of the other structures in the city. They really were the defining feature of the city's world-famous skyline. That was the first and last time I saw them in person - ironically, it was from the air.
Being of that generation, I also remember where I was when this event occurred. Living in California, there was a three-hour time difference. I was staying with my mother at the time, and I remember that she awakened me at about 7 AM, as she was getting ready for work, on that Tuesday morning, saying something about a "terrorist attack" in New York City. The first thing you think is "nuclear," and when I turned on the TV, that's definitely what I initially thought. I remembered the 1993 bombing, and knew that no one single device could do this otherwise. No one could initially conceive that it was due to hijacked commercial air liners being flown into buildings - other than Tom Clancy, I suppose. I had also read "Debt of Honor" in my early 20s, but that was inconceivable at the moment, until later when I saw the video.
I could see little but a blanket of white that looked almost like a fog bank encompassing nearly all of lower Manhattan, until I realized that one of the towers had fallen, but I still didn't know why. I remember sitting there for about thirty seconds, and then seeing in real time the second tower, the North tower, fall. The survivors in the book do a far better job of describing it than I can. More than twenty years later, a generation now passed, I still can't really describe in words what that was like. I called my dad, when I could again form rational thought, and he didn't know anything about it. He hadn't turned on the TV or heard on the radio, so I told him to turn on the TV.
The first time I visited the site was only a few weeks after the memorial had opened, in September, 2011 (the kickoff weekend of the Occupy movement!). I was attending a conference at Fordham University, and on my last day in New York I managed to get an entrance pass to the site, only recently opened to the general public, which was obviously under heavy security at the time. That was likewise a surreal moment. The new tower was still under construction, as was the museum which is now at the site, but much of the memorial had been constructed. Today, 11 years later, it's something of an open-air park, so it's easier to access. It's something everyone should make an effort to visit at least once in their lifetime, especially the generations which don't remember 9/11 personally, so that this event doesn't fade into history. To that end, it's also worthwhile to read this and other books before you go. That way, you will recognize many of the names on the memorial, which makes them more than just names, creating a personal connection even if you didn't experience this tragic day yourself.
