August 31, 2006

Reactions to the book, via e-mail and letter, phone call and anecdote, have been heartening and overwhelming.

My friend Bobbi Baker Burrows, of Life magazine, was reading the book on the train. Within no time the four or five people near her in the bar car, noticing the jacket photo, wanted to share their experiences about September 11. Photographer Jeff Mermelstein phoned to say he'd heard about my book from novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who approached him in his local grocery store, in Brooklyn, to say that he was reading the book and to ask if Jeff knew about it. (Jeff's mentioned it in, having taken truly remarkable images on September 11, many of which were exhibited at the International Center of Photography in 2002.) Luc Sante, the Bard College cultural savant and photography historian wrote to say: "It's gripping, profound, far-reaching -- in fact, an entirely new way of writing about history, a stunning achievement."

George Rider, the de facto mayor, good-will ambassador, and resident dynamo of Lonelyvile, Fire Island (our good friend and landlord for a decade now; a budding memoirist, having published numerous columns in the local press) left me a note that was part thank-you, part journal entry: "the book...must be on the required reading list for all high school juniors and seniors. It is also a 'must read' for all of us who love our country as much as he does." He goes on, relating a story from early August: "Here I sit glued to the T.V. watching and listening to the [foiled] al-Qaeda airlines plot. It is surreal to be emersed in David's book and at the same time view the events rapidly unfolding in England. I challenge those who would perpetrate such evil to read the book and take from it the lessons to be learned. Stop! Think! Love your families, love your children, and help make a better world for all of us." Would that it were that simple.

And Richard Pyle, of the Associated Press (Saigon bureau chief during a good stretch of the Vietnam War), was moved to send an e-mail, relating several memories, written on September 11, after he watched that day's events from his Brooklyn rooftop: "There was no substitute for seeing this with one's own eyes. It was far more than visual. There was an acrid smell from the smoke, which the wind was carrying directly above us. Thousands of pieces of paper drifted with it, like a huge school of silver fish in the bright sun, falling on trees, buildings and streets."

Everyone seems to have a 9/11 story to tell, a gripping or heartbreaking or even mundane account that transports the storyteller and the listener back in time, five years, in the span of a mere paragraph or two. On September 11, each of our individual stories was part of the larger narrative.

In every facet of existence, in fact, we are all part of the larger narrative, our stories intertwined.