Until the Fires Stopped Burning
9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Charles B. Strozier's college lost sixty-eight alumni in the tragedy of 9/11, and the many courses he has taught on terrorism and related topics since have attracted dozens of survivors and family members. A practicing psychoanalyst in Manhattan, Strozier has also accepted many seared by the disaster into his care. In some ways, the grief he has encountered has felt familiar; in other ways, unprecedented. Compelled to investigate its unique character further, he launched a fascinating study into the conscious and unconscious meaning of the event, both for those who were physically close to the attack and for those who witnessed it beyond the immediate space of Ground Zero.
Based on the testimony of survivors, bystanders, spectators, and victim's friends and families, Until the Fires Stopped Burning brings much-needed clarity to the conscious and unconscious meaning of 9/11 and its relationship to historical disaster, apocalyptic experience, unnatural death, and the psychological endurance of trauma. Strozier interprets and contextualizes the memories of witnesses and compares their encounter with 9/11 to the devastation of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Katrina, and other events Kai Erikson has called a "new species of trouble" in the world. Organizing his study around "zones of sadness" in New York, Strozier powerfully evokes the multiple places in which his respondents confronted 9/11 while remaining sensitive to the personal, social, and cultural differences of these experiences. Most important, he distinguishes between 9/11 as an apocalyptic event (which he affirms it is not;rather, it is a monumental event), and 9/11 as an apocalyptic experience, which is crucial to understanding the act's affect on American life and a still-evolving culture of fear in the world.
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Strozier, the director for the Center of Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, collects interviews with individuals inside the towers as well as those who watched the events unfold from a distance, from other boroughs, or from around the world. As the first disaster of its kind broadcast live across the globe, Strozier argues that the event was "immediately and repeatedly played back with more and deepening commentary," an unprecedented presentation by the media that led to different responses depending on the viewers' proximity to Ground Zero. His research is based on analyzing subjects' interviews, and consequently, the book feels more like a survey accessible and anecdotal if cursory. Readers will find the analysis more provocative than satisfying such compelling sections as one on the language of traumatic memory are too summarily and swiftly handled. Still, the brisk treatment and somewhat repetitive presentation are more than compensated by the breadth of new information on how citizens experienced and psychologically processed the day.