After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years that Followed

by Mary Marshall Clark (Editor), Peter Bearman (Editor), Catherine Ellis (Editor), Stephen Drury Smith (Editor)

Overview

New Yorkers remember 9/11 in this landmark volume of oral history commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attacks—A “staggering book of living memory” (Booklist, starred review).
 
Within days of September 11, 2001, Columbia’s Oral History Research Office deployed interviewers across the city to collect the accounts and observations of hundreds of people from a diverse mix of New York neighborhoods and backgrounds. With follow-up interviews spanning years, the project produced a deep and revealing look at how the attacks changed individual lives and communities in New York City.
 
After the Fall presents a selection of these fascinating testimonies, with heartbreaking and enlightening stories from a broad range of New Yorkers. The interviews include first-responders, taxi drivers, school teachers, artists, religious leaders, immigrants, and others who were interviewed numerous times since the 2001 attacks. The result is a remarkable time-lapse account of the city as it changed in the wake of 9/11, one that will resonate powerfully with New Yorkers and millions of others who continue to feel the impact of the most damaging foreign attack to ever occur inside the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595586476
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	09/06/2011
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	678,322
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mary Marshall Clark is director of the Columbia UniversityOral History Research Office and a past president of the Oral History Association.

Peter Bearman is the Cole Professor of the Social Sciences at Columbia University. He is the author of Doormen and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. They both live in New York City.

Catherine Ellis is a contributing producer with American RadioWorks, the documentary unit of American Public Media. She is founder of Audio Memoir, which chronicles personal stories for families and organizations. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Stephen Drury Smith is the executive editor and host of American RadioWorks® and is the winner of the DuPont-Columbia UniversityGold Baton. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Editorial Reviews

Every New Yorker has a story of the morning of September 11, and Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office has made an admirable effort to collect a wide sampling. The editors present accounts of the attacks and their aftermath, conveying diverse stories “as they unfolded in an extraordinary moment.” The most affecting stories in this diligent oral history convey the immediacy and horror of the scene around the World Trade Center towers. Accounts from paramedics wading into the inferno and office workers evacuated moments before the buildings’ collapse go deep into the essence of surviving amid chaos. “You hear this terrible roaring sound,” said ambulance driver James Dobson, “And all you hear are these explosions, and everything got black,” while the terrified passengers in his vehicle passed a respirator around to survive, breath by breath. Across the city, Muslim teacher Debbie Almontaser struggled to calm her fifth-grade pupils as terrified parents collected them one by one. As it became clear that the attackers were Muslim, she worried about wearing her headscarf and turned later to community outreach efforts as dozens of Arab men were detained, while her oldest son served in a National Guard unit sorting through body parts in the scorched rubble. The patchwork quality hints at the scale of confusion on September 11 itself, and the numberless ways in which those experiences rippled though the city, the nation, and the world. Ten years on, the power of these stories endures. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"A meticulously edited and staggering book of 'living memory.'"
—Booklist (starred review)

"The 19 people whose stories are charted here range from artists and street vendors to paramedics, psychotherapists and priests; their collected conversations root the events of 9/11 in the context of their own lives—and the life of the city itself."
—Salon.com

Many recent and new 9/11 books include quick snapshots of the human response to the tragedy, but this volume is especially recommended for the length (ten to 20 pages each) and thoughtfulness of the interviews.
—Library Journal

From the Publisher