Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

by Mitchell Zuckoff

With time, news becomes history. And history, it’s been said, is what happened to other people.5 For anyone who lived through September 11, time might dull the anger and grief that followed the death and destruction caused when terrorists turned four commercial passenger jets into guided missiles. But the memories won’t die. The pain of the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history cut too deep, leaving knots of psychic scars that make each day an experience of before and after, of adapting to a world changed physically by every security checkpoint and psychologically by every mention of the “homeland,”6 a word seldom used in the United States prior to the events now known as 9/11.