Customer Reviews

911: The Book of Help (Authors Respond to the Tragedy)

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"USE WORDS" author Naomi Shihab Nye offers in a new book, published by Cricket Books (the
children's publisher) and Carus Publishing, called _911: The Book of Help_. "USE WORDS. It is the
most helpful thing I have learned in my life. . . Whether we write them down for ourselves or send them into
the air as connective lifelines between us, they help us live, breathe, and see."

Walter Dean Myers--five time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award--tells it differently, shortly after 9/11
from London, as what was thought to be another terrorist attack brought down a plane in Queens: "I watched
as a group of young men stood in front of an appliance store and watched the events on a television in the
window. They were cheering the destruction. . . I watched one young man in particular: he was slapping the
backs of his fellow watchers and making a big show of his glee at the image of the burning plane. . . ."
Myers son, he writes, was to leave from California to the Middle East as an Air Force chaplain. In those
moments watching the young man, a young man not so unlike his own son--the chaplain ("[t]hey both
profess beliefs in a loving, merciful God"), the author nevertheless embraces a stunning reality: he has, in
that moment, an *enemy*. . . if only in the instinct which seeks to protect his son.

Sonya Sones' tender and gripping poem "Voices" is one of the most moving, and dramatic, pieces in this
book. Simple in its three lined stanza form and in its utterance, it recalls the many struggling faces of horror
and tragedy: "I am the one/ who'd traveled from Kansas/ to see the view from the top.//. . . I am the one/
who fought with my wife/ before I came to work// I am the one/ who'd just found out/ my cancer was in
remission.//. . . I am the one/ who looked up from my desk/and first saw the plane bearing down.//. . . I am
the one/ who held my daughter close to me/and prayed.//. . . We are the ones/who were blown/through the
glass//. . . We are the ones/who can't/rest in peace.//. . . ."

Author David Paterson dropped what he was doing, after he could not stand it any longer, and went down to
Ground Zero to see if he could help. At one point he finds in the pile "the miniature painting of a
three-masted ship. . . the tiny brush strokes. . . impressive, creating both waves breaking against the ship and
the gentle clouds pushing it on its way." There was, also, a torn area "from shrapnel". He could read the
name of the artist--it belonged to a woman who had retired from an office in One World Trade. She awaited
the painting, pulled from the rubble, in Houston.

Kyoko Mori, author of the memoir _The Dream of Water_ and two time ALA Best Books for Young Adults
winner, writes "I had been lucky: I had been sheltered from the war, violence, and hunger that devastated a
great portion of the world. . . [and] even as I grieve. . . I want to welcome the opportunity to belong to the
rest of the world. . . the bond that suffering creates between people past and present, here and there, and all
over the world."

Whether we know another by the name "enemy" or "friend," it is--as Naomi Shihab Nye has requested of
us--a matter of letting our words express our humanity. One cannot really say this is a self-serving directive;
now compels a dialog, an anti-war, an opening into which words explain ourselves--so we may then
embrace.

--Peter Money is a librarian, teacher, poet & writer, & member of PEN New England. *This book recommended for Teen and Adult Collections*