The Smoke Week: Sept. 11-21, 2001 Review

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(More customer reviews)Two years after September 11th 2001 it has become difficult for many of us to remember what those days felt like. Even at the time the media were busy selecting what we would see, hear, and know. The emphasis at the time was on those who died and those who lost family members and friends to death. The vociferous antiwar sentiment among so many New Yorkers never made it to TV or major newspapers. Since then the whole event has been swallowed up in the political narratives we tell about what followed.
Ellis Avery's THE SMOKE WEEK is an incredibly immediate account of some ordinary New Yorkers grappling with the WTC attacks and their aftermath. The book describes the smells and sounds of a city filled with death and destruction, how people struggle to make sense of an unprecedented experience, their painful return to some normalcy, their confusion about how the US should respond.
Told almost completely without hindsight, the book grabs us with its poetry. It delivers concrete experience, sensation, perception. Avery doesn't explain, predict or preach: she bears witness using images and metaphors of great power and beauty.
This is a beautiful and moving account of ugly times. I've noticed that people who make each other's acquaintance for the first time post-9/11/01 soon need to trade stories of where they were that day. It seems that we still need to return to that day and understand it from an individual point of view. This book is a chance to read one person's story -- a representative story, but told with unique grace. If you can bear to read only one book about September 11th, read this one.

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Notable Award 2004 Writers Notes Book Award for Culture & Winner of the Ohioana Library's Walter Rumsey Marvin Award--A New Yorker's personal account of the events of the worse terrorist attack the USA has ever faced.-- "Here is Witness. Here is Testimony."--Maxine Hong Kingston

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