September 11: An Oral History (Hardcover)

by Dean Murphy (Author) "Teresa Veliz was the facilities manager for Clearforest, a software development company that had offices on the 47th floor of the North Tower..." (more)
Key Phrases: shopping concourse, command bus, first plane hit, World Trade Center, New York, North Tower (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (August 27, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385507682
• ISBN-13: 978-0385507684
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #864,524 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best one volume I have read about Sept 11., September 24, 2002

By	Iconophoric - See all my reviews

This book is better, if only for hitting precisely the right tone for me as a reader, than the couple of other "oral history" volumes I have read on this subject. It is the opposite of commercial writing or wham-bam journalism: it has the serious purpose and tone of sensitive, well-written fiction. The stories in this particular book have become the "real" September 11, 2001 to me as a distant observer, that is, the virtual physical space my imagination inhabits when I think of those buildings and the people and the day.

The vision of the participants is in ways more indelible, if that is possible, than the images of collapse that we have seen on TV scores or hundreds of times. Past a point, those images numb you; you cannot comprehend the how and why of such a thing happening, and it may take you a while to even come to that conclusion, after spending months trying to make sense of the puzzle and the horror. And eventually, to take some of the heartache away, you may do what a generation did with the Kennedy assasinations, turning them from high tragedy to an intellectual detective story. You think about the physics of the collapse, the engineering of the towers, the whereabouts of the criminal masterminds. You can only dwell on horror for so long. This book returns you to the human dimension that the footage of the falling buildings may, ironically, have dulled for you.

There are moments here that will be with you the rest of your days. The still-interiorized words of those who lived through the worst of it, which we are priveleged to share here, can be harrowing and nearly overwhelmingly sad. But while it is often sad, this is not a sentimental memoir. Be warned, there is some very disturbing, specific content here. Murphy's September11: An Oral History is a profound book that belongs in anyone's library.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Miss This Book, November 6, 2002

By	Marilyn J. Ranson "skye88" (Elk Grove, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book tells the personal stories of a variety of people in New York, young and old, at the time the planes hit the World Trade Center. Each story is three to four pages long, which makes for easy reading. Each is well written and filled with emotion. I was truly on the edge of my seat reading some of these stories, even though I knew the end of their story (obviously they survived to tell about it). Why isn't this a best-seller?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More Informative than the news, October 21, 2004

By	Hillary - See all my reviews

I found that this book provided a sense of what really happened than what I saw on T.V. While the news gave you all the facts and data, this author wrote interviews he took from people who were actually in the WTC, Pentagon, and those in surronding buildings. After reading this I finally had a sense of how people reacted during the horrific events.