September 11: An Oral History

Amazon.com
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


From Publishers Weekly
"A Changed Commute, a Saved Life"; "A Police Officer Loses His Friends and His Passion"; "A Prayer to Die Quickly and Painlessly"; "A Mother's Run for Her Life": as the titles of the personal accounts in New York Times reporter Murphy's volume indicate, the stories are by turns frightening, sad, surprising, terrible and miraculous. Scenes from the lives of those who were closest to the disaster, they provide a crucial and moving record, one guaranteed to produce chills in all but the toughest of readers. The immediacy of these accounts can be stunning, as are the twists of luck and split-second decisions that led to survival.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Murphy's book is a 9/11 oral history. He is a New York Times reporter, and his collection of approximately 40 survivor stories is underscored by the idea that when September 11 "was all over, it was a day of national calamity. But it was also a day of individual human heartache." The personal accounts he compiles here serve to support that sentiment to the fullest. One can't find a more eloquent explanation of the situation at the World Trade Center than the words spoken by the woman who was master of the keys at the Center: "I wasn't burnt or severely bruised. My pain was somewhere else--and it still is. Inside my heart, it hurts so bad." And only the most inured readers will not react with tears to the story of the sight-impaired man being carefully led down the stairs from high in the Center by his devoted seeing-eye dog. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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Soul-stirring firsthand accounts�terrifying transports�of living through the disasters of September 11, as told to New York Times reporter Murphy. Murphy was one of the reporters who covered that grave day and its aftermath, and for this collection he took on the unenviable task of asking those who survived by the skin of their teeth to relive the catastrophe, plus a handful of people who, by the grace of fortune, were slow at making their morning coffee or decided to change travel plans and so missed a doomed airplane. Murphy admits to some "compositing" of the testimony, but he strove for accuracy and credibility. And the stories simply rattle, first from those who had to wait in jam-ups to get onto escalators or out the door. But those that most whiten the knuckles by far are the near-escapes. For instance, the fireman who dove into the lobby of the South Tower to escape the crumbling edifice and was buried in the rubble, or the office worker who heard the building�s public-address system say it was safe to return to work: He heard people screaming, " �They�re jumping. People are jumping�. . . There was a tremendous disconnect between what was happening around me and the announcement that it was safe to go back upstairs." Or the management services worker who had just walked out of the tower: "Just 50 yards behind me a hundred and ten stories started coming down. . . . I became buried in debris and soot. The whole place was as dark as the darkest night." More buried people were rescued than is common knowledge, and Murphy found a handful of them. One of the real keepers of the flurry of 9/11 publications, destined to find a place on the shelf and be turned to time and again.


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