Book summary

In this sober, and sobering, treatise, noted author Susan Faludi argues that America's response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, evolved very quickly into a tsunami of over-heated rhetoric that drew on stereotypes of masculinity and victimhood, and metastasized quickly into fantasy. Acknowledging the seriousness of the attacks (in fact she strives to see them for what they were), and without minimizing the tragedy of those who died and the suffering of their loved ones, Faludi argues that the communal dialogue, fueled by shame and by the trauma of the event, was hijacked to promote pre-existing agendas of the right, and self-serving commentators of the right and center. To support her argument, she draws on her wide survey of the mainstream press, as well as the pronouncements of public officials who could do little more than retreat into frontier metaphors. In Faludi's opinion, we need to reexamine our national response to the horrible events of 9/11 and forthrightly ask ourselves whether the bravado rhetoric makes us safer now than we were before.

Media reviews

"Susan Faludi has written a brilliant, unsentimental, often darkly humorous account of America's nervous breakdown after 9/11."