A disquieting retelling of 9/11 by one survivor with a surprising twist.
The story of the startling disclosure of a 9/11 survivor who wasn’t actually there.
Fisher (Narrative Journalism/Rutgers Univ.; After the Fire, 2008, etc.) and filmmaker Guglielmo team up to bring readers a page-turning account of Tania Head, a survivor of the World Trade Center attacks. Vivid details place readers at the scene of 9/11 during and after the attacks, which may be painful reading for some readers. Injured when one of the planes struck the 78th-floor sky lobby of the South Tower, Head not only survived this near-death experience but also bore the tragedy of losing her new husband in the collapse of the North Tower. She rose to acclaim in the years after 9/11 by starting the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, where guilt-laden men and women could openly voice their distress about the events of that day. Head also helped lead the campaign to save the Survivor Stairway, “thirty-seven steps that had once connected the plaza outside the towers to the street below,” which was used by hundreds fleeing the buildings on 9/11. However, as the narrative progresses, readers begin to see small discrepancies in Head’s story, along with her terrible mood swings and violent physical reactions to reliving that fateful day. Under extreme pressure to conduct an interview with the New York Times in 2007, Head broke down, and her elaborate and fake story fully emerged. She soon disappeared. Members of the Survivors’ Network were left to wonder why someone would go to such lengths to gain notoriety, especially when it involved so many who had survived real damage on that day.
A disquieting retelling of 9/11 by one survivor with a surprising twist.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5208-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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