The Smoke Week: Sept. 11-21, 2001 (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...goes right to the heart of what the living do and shows us a world..." [of healing]. -- Jacqueline Woodson, author of Hush

"Her account is more intimate and real than any other I have come across." -- Robert Canzoneri, author of A Highly Ramified Tree

"Here is Witness. Here is Testimony." -- Maxine Hong Kingston

Product Description

A moving memoir about the worst terrorist attack in the U.S. by New York writer Ellis Avery. Winner of the Ohioana Library Walter Rumsey Marvin Award and a Notable Writers Notes Book Award for Culture.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Gival Press, LLC (October 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1928589243
• ISBN-13: 978-1928589242
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,213,892 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Memoir of September 11th, October 7, 2003

By A Customer

Two years after September 11th 2001 it has become difficult for many of us to remember what those days felt like. Even at the time the media were busy selecting what we would see, hear, and know. The emphasis at the time was on those who died and those who lost family members and friends to death. The vociferous antiwar sentiment among so many New Yorkers never made it to TV or major newspapers. Since then the whole event has been swallowed up in the political narratives we tell about what followed.

Ellis Avery's THE SMOKE WEEK is an incredibly immediate account of some ordinary New Yorkers grappling with the WTC attacks and their aftermath. The book describes the smells and sounds of a city filled with death and destruction, how people struggle to make sense of an unprecedented experience, their painful return to some normalcy, their confusion about how the US should respond.

Told almost completely without hindsight, the book grabs us with its poetry. It delivers concrete experience, sensation, perception. Avery doesn't explain, predict or preach: she bears witness using images and metaphors of great power and beauty.

This is a beautiful and moving account of ugly times. I've noticed that people who make each other's acquaintance for the first time post-9/11/01 soon need to trade stories of where they were that day. It seems that we still need to return to that day and understand it from an individual point of view. This book is a chance to read one person's story -- a representative story, but told with unique grace. If you can bear to read only one book about September 11th, read this one.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's not what you're thinking!, November 11, 2003

By A Customer

If you are contemplating this book with heavy heart and jaundiced eye, thinking, Yeah right, yet another crass attempt to capitalize on one of the grimmest moments in our history - think again. This is a book to read if you are more interested in testimonial than posturing, and more interested in commemoration than remembering. What I mean is, "remembering" was sold to us by the media as a nightmarish repetition of the events of 9/11, as if looking at those images over and over again could make us understand what happened. Well, of course it didn't, and that's not, mercifully, what Avery offers here. Instead she fixes memory, roots it in place through her exacting account of a city's efforts to reconstitute itself in the wake of disaster. And reconstitution in Avery's New York does not mean pretending that everything will be fine, that everything can go back to the way it was. It means waking up to the fact that even the most apparently insignificant action can be all that stands between despair and courage, between isolation and connection.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Writers Notes 2004 Book Award Winner, April 27, 2005

By	Writers Notes Magazine "Book Editor" (www.WritersNotes.com) - See all my reviews

In the form of a refined diary, Avery provides a nearby view of the falling of the World Trade Center. A brief window of ten days reveals the immediacy and raw emotion of a gathering opinion, and as the smoke clears, she passes through panic, fear, grief, and a bit of naivety, while her life, city, and country change forever.