Friday, September 11, 2015

Five of the best 9/11 books

David L. Ulin is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith and book critic at the Los Angeles Times.

One of five essential 9/11 books he tagged for the Los Angeles Times in 2011:
In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman (2004)

A longtime resident of Lower Manhattan, Spiegelman felt the attack on the World Trade Center viscerally: His daughter had started high school across the street from the twin towers just days before. "In the Shadow of No Towers" refracts his anxiety, his belief that the world, in some fundamental sense, has ended, through the filter of 10 full-color broadside comics that originally appeared in the German paper Die Zeit and LA Weekly because they were too incendiary for the mainstream American press. The strips here literally jangle with chaos, with the edginess of waiting for the other shoe to drop. "On 9/11/01 time stopped," Spiegelman writes. "By 9/12/01 clocks began to tick again … but everyone knew it was the ticking of a giant time bomb."
Read about the other books on Ulin's list.

--Marshal Zeringue