I HEARD THE SIRENS SCREAM: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks

by Laurie Garrett

Most observers have viewed the anthrax and al-Qaeda episodes separately, imagining the tragedies were coincident in time, but completely disconnected. In contrast, I HEARD THE SIRENS SCREAM by Pulitzer Prize winning author Laurie Garrett reveals a political, emotional, and investigative arc that links the terrorist hijackings and anthrax mailings, and shows that the combined impact impelled the war agenda and heightened anxieties among Americans. The United States of America was utterly transformed by the combination of the al-Qaeda and anthrax attacks. In riveting form, I HEARD THE SIRENS SCREAM unfolds like a novel, revealing shocking revelations on every page. Reviewers have said: "Few people in the world could have provided a more accurate chronicla and analysis of those events than Laurie Garrett. Garrett's book is not only a superb chronicle of past events, it is also an illimunating guide to use in dealing with threats that are still current." - Julio Frenck, Dean of the Harvard School of Puclic Health & Octavio Gomez-Dantes, National Institute of Public Health in Cuernavaca, Mexico "More than a terrific book, "I Heard the Sirens Scream" is a monument to a period. Garrett began writing on the day the Twin Towers fell. She made her way into lower Manhattan that day and most other days during the next four months. From that vantage she wrote a daily missive, as she calls it, plying her skills as a premier reporter and science writer. But woven into commentaries of heroism and missteps are her freely expressed emotions. A reader cannot help but share Garrett's grief about lost lives, her rage at the perpetrators, and pride in New York's selfless rescue workers. Much of Garrett's narrative is also devoted to the spread of anthrax spores via threat letters that were mailed in the wake of 9/11. The Capitol, Pentagon, Supreme Court, and Federal Reserve were closed because of suspected or actual anthrax contamination. Like those who unk

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics

698 pages, Paperback

First published July 18, 2011

About the author

Laurie Garrett was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996 for a series of works published in Newsday that chronicled the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire.

If Laurie Garrett hadn't interrupted her science career to pursue journalism, she probably would have been a professor at a top-rate university doing AIDS research in her lab, says Lee Herzenberg, geneticist at Stanford University and a longtime mentor for Garrett.

Garrett (born 1951) had advanced to a doctoral candidacy in immunology at University of California at Berkeley before deciding that "journalism would be more fun and interesting." She learned the craft at a California radio station, eventually joining National Public Radio as a science correspondent. After eight years at NPR, she joined Newsday in 1986. It was an unusual hiring for Newsday; Garrett had no newspaper experience.

But Garrett, whose flamboyant personality matches her spirit of adventure, already was experienced at traveling the world reporting on new diseases, especially the emergence of AIDS in East Africa. For Newsday, she returned to Africa for further reporting on AIDS and to India where she wrote about a plague outbreak. During the Persian Gulf war, when Jordan's borders were closed, Garrett managed to get in from Israel with a Paris-based doctors' group to report on refugees. She also toted back a bag of Saddam Hussein souvenir watches and SCUD missile earrings for her colleagues. In 10 years, her accordion-like passport has 45 visa stamps from different nations.

Her book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance was a paperback best-seller in 1995. The Brooklyn resident is currently president of the National Association of Science Writers.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the 2nd (800 plus pages...ouch!) book I have read by this author.

Her research is rock solid and understandable. Instead of struggling to comprehend a scientific theory or term, she defines what she is speaking about. She mainly writes about scientific issues (the first I read was about Contagions).

There is one more large book on my list she wrote and I can already tell she is going g to screw up my book goal for the year (her and Obama).

If you thought you knew about 911,even if you were there, I still highly recommend this book. It is not political in its origin, which is nice bc both parties screwed up in major ways. It is simply documentation of events that occurred in our local, state and federal agencies post 911.

I almost didn’t read this...thinking it would not be applicable now. I was horrifically wrong. Mistakes made them are affecting our public health, military and scientific agencies for the worse and likely resulted in many of the problems we had when COVID-19 came to the US.

This is likely the longest review I have written in ages.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laurie Garrett knows her stuff. In this book, she breaks down the terrorist attacks of 2001 in a methodical day-by-day format. There is probably nobody who has a greater command of the interdisciplinary admixture of public health policy, infectious diseases, bioterrorism, and political savvy than Ms. Garrett. On the whole, the ad hoc governmental response to serious biological threats is unsurprising given the independence and fractured communications systems of the agencies involved; still, the overall lack of cohesion and preparedness (not to mention popular ignorance of feasible response options) is kind of jaw-dropping. I recommend this book for anyone who wants a comprehensive snapshot of our public health system.

[Roger Briggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

The closing paragraph of an author's eye witness to history:

"People never grow accustomed to fear. Once their minds, and those tiny almond-shaped parts of their brains have been scarred by the emotional force of extraordinary experience the vulnerability remains. What can, and does, change is the capacity to cope with the sensation of fear, and the constellation of sensations a triggered amygdala showers over the brain. Some individuals may be fated to feel traumatic stress the rest of their lives, but most soldiers of war, victims of atrocities and veterans of the devastation of the World Trade Center have proven resilient, able to process horrors revisited, threats renewed and challenges as they arise. The question facing the United States of America ten years after the fall of 2001 is whether the country, for decades lulled into a dreamy, fear-free existence, can overcome the fear induced by assault on the collective amygdalae."

So much to unpack here, a riveting chronicle of events following the attack on 911 and our government's disorganized and misdirected response that lays the groundwork for the COVID pandemic of 2020-?

[Tom & Beverly · Rating 4 out of 5]

so far very interesting as she had an inside view of many of the events and then went back to fill in the gaps. The lack of communication and inability of the various agencies to coordinate and cooperate was worse than I thought it could be. The politicians seemed to constantly have their feet in their mouths and exploited a terrible situation to their apparent benefit. Not a pretty view of government and not much seems to have been learned in 10 years. Of course now that there is no money to fix the inherent lessons learned it does not bode well for the future of a coordinated public health system. The anthrax conclusions will be interesting to all

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cricky, this book needs editing!! This seems to be an endemic problem with ebooks, but this is the worst one i have encountered. Garrett has important info to impart but it will be lost due to REALLY BAD editing. Not only is there too much unnecessary info included, but the book is so badly disorganized it is, at times, almost unreadable.
And she is telling 2 stories: 1) her trauma over the 9-11 attacks and 2) the government screw-up story. In my opinion, she should have focused on the second story. MOstly, she should have hired a really good editor to organize the whole mess. There is such good information here that will go unread by most people and i think that is a shame.

[Sharman Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four months of journal entries by a reporter living in Brooklyn, documenting the 9/11 and anthrax attacks. She looks at it from pretty much every angle. The rest of the book covers certain important issues and things learned (or not!). So sad and frustrating to know how unprepared we were, despite many prophetic voices from intelligence agents to public health workers. So many things boil down to power plays and money going to the wrong places. So much shortsightedness and so many blind spots.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of thought-provoking material in this book, which combines the author's journal entries from 2001-02 with research and a tenth anniversary perspective.It's diminished a little by the numerous typos and grammatical errors, which should have been caught by her editor. I wonder whether the book's sole publication media being electronic had anything to do with that?

[Jack Hastings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laurie Garrett balances excellent reportage on the government's ham-fisted approach to bioterrorism and public health with personal notes from her journal during the days following 9/11. She also served as a consultant on the film "Contagion". If you prefer to remain complacent about the government's concern for its citizens, do not read this book.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far this is fascinating, heartbreaking, frustrating and I deep. I have teared up several times already.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book because I heard the author on NPR. The information is good but the book gets lost in its own details.

[Connie · Rating 5 out of 5]

First person view from Brooklyn and also much of the research on both ground Zero and the anthrax attacks.