A remarkable piece of journalism, and a service to history.
An intimate, almost minute-by-minute account of the emergency response to the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.
Prior to 9/11, the Pentagon’s iconic status easily exceeded that of the World Trade Center. Nevertheless, that date’s dramatic events in New York, particularly the unimaginable collapse of the towers, have since obscured the almost simultaneous assault on the very symbol of America’s armed forces, where, write the authors, “about two million square feet of office space—the equivalent of the entire Empire State Building—was [rendered] uninhabitable due to fire, smoke, and structural damage.” U.S. Army officer and firefighter Creed and U.S. News & World Report journalist Newman (co-author: Bury Us Upside Down: The Misty Pilots and the Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, 2006) remind us of the devastation wrought in Arlington and of the almost superhuman effort required to quell the resulting inferno. From the moment the hijackers flew Flight 77 into the building, killing 59 passengers and crew members and 125 people who worked there, the Pentagon was transformed into a war zone. Using the eyewitness testimony of dozens of people inside and outside the building (a helpful index to many of the recurring names precedes the narrative), the authors painstakingly reconstruct the sequence of events, focusing particularly on the initial 48 hours and the efforts of first-responders. Though a host of government agencies were involved, the authors highlight the firefighters, particularly the Arlington County Fire Department. For these men the Pentagon’s unique design and construction—memorably explicated in Steve Vogel’s The Pentagon: A History: The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon—And to Restore it Sixty Years Later, 2007—the intensity of the explosion and the persistent flames combined to produce a “career fire,” the professional challenge of a lifetime. Thoroughly, but never tediously, the authors demonstrate how the firefighters—despite private fears and worries, exhaustion, dehydration and smoke inhalation, multiple threats of renewed attack, competing priorities of law enforcement and various military and political exigencies—responded brilliantly to the horror.
A remarkable piece of journalism, and a service to history.Pub Date: May 27, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-89141-905-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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