Despite the fact that I live in Manhattan, less than seven miles from the World Trade Center, my experience of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, resembles that of millions of others: I watched it on TV. And, like lots of others in the days that followed, I walked around in numb disbelief. When, I wondered, would the reality of the atrocities sink in? Friends of friends were reported killed, Manhattan's streets were quiet, and for weeks if you ate at a New York City restaurant you never heard people laugh.
But it wasn't until mid-November that the events came into focus for me. I was waiting on a street corner holding hands with my son, a second-grader at the time, and a fire engine, siren wailing, slowed at the intersection to make a turn. The firefighters on the back of the engine came into view, and our eyes met briefly.
In that moment, as I looked into the weary, desolate faces of these men who no doubt had lost close friends at the World Trade Center -- and who were rushing to danger yet again -- the sadness enveloping the entire city, and the country, seemed palpable. And so did the sense of grim resolve. I waved to the firefighters, and they waved back. "Why are you crying, Mommy?" my son asked. "Because I never knew," I said. "I never knew our world was so fragile."
We all understand that fragility now, but the events of Sept. 11 largely remain beyond interpretation -- we are still too close to that day for history to parse and to explain how 19 fanatics with the support of who knows how many others, succeeded beyond their twisted dreams in carrying out mass murder in Lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and in a field in rural Pennsylvania. Facts we have, or at least some of them, but the meaning is beyond us.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the attacks is that the perpetrators snuffed out the lives of thousands by exploiting the very openness of our society -- with its easy-to-access commercial airline system and loose control over who comes into the country and where they go once here. War may distract us, but only time will give the perspective and the distance needed to digest all that happened on what had dawned as a beautiful morning in much of America.
Right now, the books about 9 / 11 that are worth reading are the personal testimonies of those who were there. And since thanks to television we were all there, the field is open to many comers: politicians, novelists, reporters called to the scene, office workers caught in the maelstrom, firefighters and police officers doing their jobs, and little children trying to understand the unfathomable. Sure, some people were physically closer than others, but everyone has something to say. And judging from the tsunami of books emerging in the weeks around the anniversary, many, many have chosen to say it.
Unless it's a particular interest of yours, you can pass on any of the new histories of Islamic fundamentalism. People knew about the Nazis' anti-Semitism years before the Holocaust, yet those views and the Germans' "grievances" after World War I tell only part of the story of why six million Jews were slaughtered.
Skippable, too, is The Cell: Inside the 9 / 11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA failed to Stop It by John Miller, Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell (Hyperion, 304 pages, $24.95). TV journalist Miller and his collaborators throw together lots of information about how American officials tracked al-Qaeda for years but didn't follow up on the leads that might have prevented the attacks.
Most Americans know that the intelligence community failed in this case, on a scale unequalled in the country's history, but this book adds only new details, not new insights.
Out of the Blue: The Story of September 11, 2001 from Jihad to Ground Zero by Richard Bernstein and the staff of The New York Times (Times Books, 288 pages, $25) is a more comprehensive and thoughtful piece of writing, but if you've read the papers attentively for the last 12 months, you don't need this book.
Penetrating political and social analysis is not what's thick on the ground at this moment -- it's still primary sources time as people recount what they saw, and how they felt, and as photographers assemble their unforgettable images (see below.) Look to September 11: An Oral History by Dean E. Murphy (Doubleday, 224 pages, $22.95) for a well-written collection of the memories of people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that day. New York Times reporter Murphy found a wide range of front-line witnesses.
Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, 2001 by Mitchell Fink and Lois Mathias (Regan Books, 320 pages, $24.95) is another, more rambling, set of first-hand accounts. Included there is the testimony of David Kravette, a Cantor Fitzgerald broker on the 105th floor of the first tower hit, who escaped death by a fluke: men coming to see him for an early morning appointment forgot their IDs so he had to go down to the lobby to escort them up. He thought about asking his assistant to go for them, but she was eight months pregnant at the time. She died, he lived.
"It actually gets worse as time goes on. It sinks in more as life gets more normal," he says. Edward Aswad, a police officer recalls arriving at the scene and being angry that people were jumping from the tower's upper floors. "I honestly thought we'd be able to help them. I thought we were in control."
There is some compelling journalism to be found in What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001 in Words, Pictures, and Video, introduction by Dan Rather. (Simon & Schuster, 128 pages, $29.95) This well-paced book, which comes with a DVD of CBS news coverage, includes stories from Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and other print sources as well as television transcripts.
It hits the highlights of the coverage as the story unfolded that day, and continued to be followed in the weeks afterward. Less experienced journalists were recruited for At Ground Zero: The Young Reporters Who Were There Tell Their Stories (Thunder's Mouth Press, 401 pages, $15.95) and the resulting book doesn't add up to much.
Input from even younger observers that is worth checking out can be found in The Day Our World Changed: Children's Art of 9 / 11, introduction by Rudolph W. Giuliani (Abrams, 128 pages, $19.95) Close to a hundred drawings and paintings by children and teen-agers in New York are presented -- and the result is a gorgeous mosaic of expressed emotion: fear, anger, pity and hope.
Perhaps teen-agers and their parents will be drawn to With Their Eyes: September 11th -- The View from a High School at Ground Zero edited by Annie Thoms (HarperTempest, 228 pages, $6.99). I was mainly struck by the overuse of the word "like" in the volume, as in "It was kind of like I was scared."
Far from New York and Washington, the people of Gander, Newfoundland, were also drawn into the crisis. Thirty-eight jetliners bound for the United States, and caught over the Atlantic at the time of the attacks, landed in the remote town, disgorging 6,595 passengers. The Day the World Came to Town: 9 / 11 in Gander, Newfoundland by Jim Defede (Regan Books, 256 pages, $23.95) tells the story of what happened next -- the outpouring of generosity by the locals, the concerns and fears of the passengers anxious to get home, the amusing culture clashes that occurred as the two groups lived together for the better part for a week.
When an enterprising Gander-area schoolteacher, Eithene Smith, was able to find kosher food for the Orthodox Jewish passengers of one plane, the rabbi who headed the group was effusive in his gratitude. Smith responded by trying to give him a reassuring hug -- he drew back immediately explaining that in his faith it was improper for him to touch a woman.
Two books meditating on the events of that day are worth mentioning. Jean Holabird, an artist living in Tribeca, has produced Out of the Ruins: A New York Record, Lower Manhattan, Autumn 2001 (Gingko Press, 144 pages, $19.95). She painted watercolors of the World Trade Center before its destruction, and depicts the scene again in the weeks afterward as workers disassemble the buildings' remains. The paintings are accompanied by excerpts from the work of famous poets that she chose. It's a moving combination. Contemporary writers far and near contributed to Afterwords: Stories and Reports from 9 / 11 and Beyond compiled by the editors of Salon.com (Washington Square Press, 288 pages, $14).
Caroline Knapp, the Boston-based magazine and book author, contributed a terrific piece to this Salon collection about the sense of "purposeless exhaustion" that set in in the days after Sept. 11. Knapp died last spring, aged 43, of lung cancer, having made a valuable addition to the body of writing about those dark hours, but doing it before their full meaning could be understood. That lies ahead, for other writers and for a world of readers who will welcome the clarity that comes with time.
Clare McHugh, founding editor of the men's magazine Maxim, is now an editor-at-large at Time Inc. She has served as editor-in-chief of New Woman and executive editor of Marie Claire.