This should have been posted sometime in September – sorry!
Smith, Dennis. Report From Ground Zero. New York: Viking, 2002.
I chose to squeeze this onto my September reading list because it matched my mood, my New York State of Mind, if you will. When you are embraced by sadness additional tragedies are easier to handle. It’s as if someone wants to throw a bucket of water on a man standing in the pouring rain. What’s a little more precipitation to an already drowning man? Bring it on.
The first thing you notice about Report From Ground Zero is how stark it is. My copy didn’t have publisher or copyright information. It was if my version was a rough draft, a real report from bowels of hell. It disturbed me and I can’t tell you why.
Dennis Smith asks the question everyone can answer even nine years later, “where were you on September 11, 2001?” In Report From Ground Zero Smith asks key rescue personnel to recount the moments directly after seeing, hearing, or learning of the attack on the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan. He calls each story a testimony. Smith starts by giving his own account which amounts to a litany of questions surrounding logistics and survival. As a retired New York City firefighter he anticipates the magnitude of destruction and ponders the challenges surrounding survival with great concern. As each rescue worker recounts that fateful, awful day a pattern starts to emerge. Initial disbelief turns into a sense of determination as the magnitude of destruction is fully realized. Every single response was to roll up the shirts sleeves, harden the jaw and with single minded pure grit get to work. After the dust has literally and figuratively settled other shared memories come to mind – how deathly quiet and dark everything became after the towers fell; how surreal the landscape. Like nothing they had even seen before or since.
While the first half of the book contains the powerful testimony of others around him, the second half of Report From Ground Zero is Smith’s diary of the aftermath of 9/11. It isn’t as emotional as the first half of the book, but sheds critical light on one man’s determination to document just how tireless and faithful those rescue personnel searched to rescue fellow officers and even family.
Favorite lines: “I am attached to the television as if every friend I had is about to cross the screen” (p 6). I think we were all that way, for days to come.
Another one: “There is no reason why I’m alive and anyone else is dead” (p 32). Words remembered by Deputy Chief Pete Hayden.
BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, simply ” 9/11″ (p 171).
~*LunaSea*~ 