As America enters the third week since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, we are increasingly seeing stories that deepen our understanding of the causes of those actions as well as the effects that continue to ripple through our world. Here's a list of stories worth reading:
Updated Oct. 4, 2001
GROUND ZERO AT THE PENTAGON: A Soldier's Story
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram published a lengthy excerpt from an extraordinary first-person journal written by U.S. army private assigned to recovery efforts at the Pentagon. Acutely observed and plainly told to family and friends, Pvt. Matthew Foldenauer's accounts echoes the eloquent letters from the front featured in Burns' Civil War documentary.
Traveling in a rented Ford Expedition, reporter Alez Tizon and photographer Alan Berner of the Seattle Times have been crossing America since the Sept. 11 attacks, filing compelling dispatches "from a new nation" along the way. The latest installment of "Crossing America" chronicles their visit to Shanksville, Pa. where United Flight 93 ended in a field of oat stubble. The entire series is online.
BATTLING HENNY PENNY
Science writer William J. Broad of The New York Times provides a useful antidote to the flurry of scare-mongering reports about biological and chemical threats in "Experts Call for Better Assessment of Threats."
Updated Oct. 3, 2001
THERE'S NO TEAM COVERAGE IN THE WORD "I"
McSweeneys.net offers one man's view of the World Trade Center attack. "Across the River," by Steve Featherstone, is a detailed, hypnotic first person account by an an unemployed NYC "New Economy" worker describing his reaction and encounters in around Jersey City home, a ferry ride across the Hudson from the World Trade Center. Recommended by Richard Davis.
In "A Ground Zero Diary: 12 Days of Fire, Fear and Grit," C.J. Chivers, a reporter for The New York Times, describes what Ground Zero at the World Trade Center was like after spending six days as a volunteer and six more covering the National Guard Ground Zero at the World Trade Center. A case study in the power of the vignette, the startling detail and the simple life truth ("In those quiet moments, anyone could be a chaplain, as long as you had ears." )
British novelist Martin Amis gives his stilleto take on the attacks on American "Fear and Loathing" from the UK's Guardian newspaper.
Posted Oct. 2, 2001
MINING THE RECORD
As every court reporter knows, a trial record can be a treasure trove of documentation. In "Life Inside Al Qaeda: A Destructive Devotion," Los Angeles Times reporters Mark Fineman and Stephen Braun paint a chilling portrait of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network by drawing on testimony, "largely unnoticed by the public at the time," of the trial of four Al Qaeda members convicted of staging the August 1998 suicide bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people."
SURVIVORS' TALES
Smart storytellers know the benefits of changing point of view. After John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, columnist Jimmy Breslin interviewed Clifton Pollard, the worker who dug the dead president's grave at Arlington National Cemetery. From that perspective, Breslin produced a haunting column that conveyed the nation's loss more poignantly than reams of eulogies from the high and mighty. In the same way, New York Times reporter Shaila K. Dewan conveys the immensity of the city's loss by shadowing the wife of a corporate CEO whose firm lost one-third of its workforce on Sept. 11 in her story, "In a Landscape of Sadness, Offering Just Her Presence"
In "The Days After," Washington Post reporters David Maraniss, Anne Hull and Paul Schwartzman trace the post-Sept. 11 lives of "a priest, a firefighter, two widows and their children, and a funeral director -- five stories out of the multitude." In a haunting allusion to Hiroshima, John Hersey's classic piece of reportrage, they note that that victims of the Japanese city levelled by an atom bomb in August 1945 shunned the label "survivor," fearing it slighted the "sacred dead." Instead, they called themselves hibakusha, which was translated into the less poetic "explosion-affected persons." "There is no corresponding name for those who lived through the events of Sept. 11," the story notes, "but they also have their own shared sensibility, a mixture of anger and understanding and love and guilt that need not be expressed in words..."
BIAS FIGHTERS
Sree Sreenivasan of Columbia Journalism School and the The South Asian Journalists Association are keeping tabs on the growing backlash against Arab Americans, Indians, Muslims, anyone, for that matter, whose skin color, language, or dress suggests a connection to suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks. Two notable stories from Seattle: Post-Intelligencer reporter D. Parvaz's account of the reaction in her city's streets when she donnned an Islamic hijaab, or scarf, over her head; and illustrations by Paul Schmid of The Seattle Times of various turbans and headgear worn by Indians, Afghans, Arabs, and Muslims.
BATTLING BIO-TERRORISM
In "Fighting Terror in the Laboratory," Mark Lisheron of The Austin American-Statesman takes a sobering look at the bioterrorism threat through the eyes of researchers at Texas A&M University.
DIGGING DEEP
There's a story behind every fund-raising jar soliciting donations for the victims of Sept. 11. In "The ties that bind," Larry Bingham of the Baltimore Sun tracks the giving spirit sparked by one girl's idea in Sheridan, Wyo.
