Never Forget: recommended readings for 9/11
Heres a collection (assembled over the years, with much input from other Rantburgers) of some of the best information on 9/11 available online today. Feel free to add to the list in the comments section.
Eyewitness accounts & actualities
Daniel Henninger, "I saw it all. Then I saw nothing." Wall Street Journal September 12, 2001
John Labriola, First-person account & accompanying photo essay
Jeff Jarvis, First-person account & audio narrative.
"Tilly" (LGF commenter), First-person account
Little Green Footballs "9/11 Stories" (discussion thread)
"The Voices Project" A Small Victory (collection of first-person accounts)
Chuck Simmins, "No Ordinary Day" (collection of weblog postings)
New York Times, Collection of audio recordings from the FDNY radio circuit
Michael Powell & Michelle Garcia, "New tapes give voice to WTC chaos" Washington Post
Audio recordings collected here
Kevin Cosgrove, 911 call from 105th floor of WTC2 (Flash animation)
Gedeon & Jules Naudet, 9/11 (documentary film).
Evan Coyne Maloney, "Crystal Morning" (Video).
Immediate reactions
John Derbyshire, "Steel and Fire and Stone" National Review Online -- written within two hours of the first attack.
James Lileks, "The Daily Bleat" 9/12/01
Peggy Noonan, "What I saw at the devastation" Wall Street Journal.
Leonard Pitts, "We'll go forward from this moment" The Ornerey American
"Sgt. Mom" (Sgt. Celia D. Hayes, USAF, Ret.), "I am all right - just in another country" (personal letter)
World Trade Center
Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn, James Glanz and Ford Fessenden. "Fighting to Live as the Towers Died" New York Times (LRR) -- an incredibly detailed reconstruction of the 102 minutes between the first attack and the final collapse.
Editorial, "Common Valor" Wall Street Journal -- ". . . in the midst of tragedy we do well to recognize that these firefighters did not lose their lives. They gave them."
Peggy Noonan, "Courage Under Fire" Wall Street Journal -- "Three hundred firemen. This is the part that reorders your mind when you think of it. For most of the 5,000 dead were there--they just happened to be there, in the buildings, at their desks or selling coffee or returning e-mail. But the 300 didn't happen to be there, they went there. In the now-famous phrase, they ran into the burning building and not out of the burning building. They ran up the stairs, not down, they went into it and not out of it. They didn't flee, they charged. "
"Mysterious Red Bandanna Man Is 9/11 Hero" WNBC-TV -- The story of Wells Crowther, an equities trader and volunteer firefighter who worked in 2 WTC, and was as much a hero as anyone that day.
Mudville Gazette (weblog), "9/11 Remembered: Rick Rescorla was a Soldier"
Andrew Duffy, "Last Man Standing" Saskatoon Star-Phoenix
Tom Junod, "The Falling Man" Esquire
Steve Fishman, "The Miracle Survivors" New York Magazine
Vincent Druding, "Ground Zero: a Journal" First Things -- account of an early volunteer in the recovery effort
Rod Dreher, "The Hole in the Skyline" National Review Online -- "Every morning when I open the door to go to work, there is a hole in the sky where the World Trade Center used to be, a memento mori, a reminder of death. Not just the death of the 2,800, but of death itself, and the impermanence of all things human. That hole is the first thing I see in the morning when I leave my house, and the last thing I see at night before I come inside for my supper."
Blue Men Group, Exhibit 13 (Flash animation).
World Trade Center (motion picture).
Bruce Springsteen, "The Rising" -- About a firefighter at the WTC. I can't forgive Springsteen his later embrace of moonbattery, but he's a talented songwriter, and this is one time he got it exactly right.
Flight 93
Dennis B. Roddy, et al., "Flight 93: forty lives, one destiny" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Karen Breslau, "The Final Moments of United Flight 93" MSNBC
Matthew L. Wald, "Details Emerge on Flight 93" New York Times (LRR)
Dave Berry, "On Hallowed Ground." Syndicated column
Steven Den Beste, "The First Anniversary" -- "In America we remember. We remember people who made choices. We remember an unforgivable attack. We remember people who refused to submit, and chose to die well, defiant to the end. We remember two words: Let's roll."
United 93 (motion picture)
Neil Young, "Lets Roll"
Other Commentary
James Lileks, "The Daily Bleat"
9/13/01 -- "The men on the plane decided to attack the hijackers. They learned what had happened in New York with the other hijacked planes; they figured their lives were lost already. They fought back. What its like to swallow your terror and act is beyond the imagination of most ordinary folks - but the point is, they were ordinary folks. Were all on that plane now."
9/14/01 -- "The planes are landing again. I saw them fly over the house tonight and I wanted to, and did, cheer. Waved them past. Gnat waved hello as well. Its a heartening sight."
the week of 9/17-21/01 -- "Im tired of people who can watch 5,000 people from 62 nations burned alive and crushed to death, and think: well, you know you had this coming."
9/11/02 -- "Were going to win. We dont have any choice."
9/11/03 -- "Two years in; the rest of our lives to go."
9/8/06 -- "Just so you know: 9/11 reset the clock for me. All hands went to midnight. Im interested in what people did after that date, and if the movie [The Path to 9/11] shows that before the attack one side lacked feck and the other was feck-deficient, I don't worry about it. It's like revisiting Congressional debates about Hawaiian harbor security in November 1941. Y'all get a pass. The Etch-A-Sketch's turned over. Now: what have you said lately?"
John Derbyshire, "Two years on" National Review -- a tribute to "small teams of inconceivably brave men and women, working in strange places, unknown and unacknowledged"
Larry Miller, "Two Years" Weekly Standard -- "That's the choice: Stop, or keep going; keep our promises, or forget we made them; be responsible, or irresponsible; face facts, or ignore them. It's easier to stop, you know. Beating these folks will take a very long time. Decades, probably, and that's if we do everything right."
Steven Green, "Terrorized? Hell No!" VodkaPundit (blog posting) -- "Remember, too, our just vengeance. Our president told us, 'I hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.' And they do hear us, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. They hear us, not because we used our weapons to murder their civilians, but to bring down their tyrants. From our loss, we gave them hope. The loss felt in Baghdad and Kabul is that of Sisyphus without his stone. The sound they hear is the ring of freedom. And they hear us, even if only a whisper, in Syria, in Iran, and - yes - they hear us in Saudi Arabia, too."
Deroy Murdock, "'Did you find her yet?'" National Review
Peggy Noonan, "A Heart, a Cross, a Flag" Wall Street Journal -- "On Sept. 10, 2001 we were, a lot of us, immersed in a national culture--a big, vivid, full-network, broadband, opens-soon-at-a-theater-near-you culture--that allowed us to live knee deep in distraction. . . . And then Sept. 11 came."
"I Just Called to Say I Love You," Wall Street Journal -- "This is what I get from the last messages. People are often stronger than they know, bigger, more gallant than they'd guess. And this: We're all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won't make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed. I think the sound of the last messages, of what was said, will live as long in human history, and contain within it as much of human history, as any old metallic roar."
Jonah Goldberg, "What's So Funny About Peace, Love & Understanding" National Review -- ". . . in a sense, 9/11 didn't expunge cynicism (as we use the word today), it redirected it to where it belongs."
Victor Davis Hanson, "The Great Divide" National Review -- "It will require an economist, politician, historian, philosopher, and artist to make sense of the world turned upside down after September 11, which unlike Y2K really did prove to be the abyss between the millennia."
Digital Archives
The September 11 Digital archive
September 11 news.com
The September 11 Web Archive
The Black Day
National Review 9/11 Archive
"We Remember" (Rantburg open thread 9/11/05).
The Last Word
George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People September 20, 2001 -- "The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them."
Never forgive, never forget, never excuse.
Posted by: Mike 2006-09-11 |