Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses
352Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses
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Overview
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780231158992 |
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Publisher: | Columbia University Press |
Publication date: | 08/19/2014 |
Pages: | 352 |
Product dimensions: | 8.60(w) x 5.70(h) x 0.80(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
IntroductionThe Event
Part I: 102 Minutes of Disaster
Zones of Sadness
1. Survivors: Zone
2. Witnesses: Zone
3. Participants: Zone
4. Onlookers: Zone
Reflections
5. The Dying
6. Apocalyptic Interlude
7. Traumasong
8. Television: Numbing and Rage
9. Hidden Children: Television's Exception
Part II: 100 Days of Suffering
10. Organic Process
11. Disrupted Lives
12. Death and Future
13. Pregnant Women
Part III: Ten Years of Effects
14. The Surprise of It All
15. On Trauma and Zones of Sadness
16. Historical Memory of the Disaster
Acknowledgments
Appendix: The Literature on Trauma and the Measurement of PTSD After 9/11
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
This is the only work on 9/11 to describe people's experiences in depth while at the same time providing a broad sense of the human impact of the whole event.
Until the Fires Stopped Burning not only captures the experience of 9/11 as it unfolded that day for responders like myself who survived but also captures the psychological experience of those for whom every day since has been 9/11-like in its power over their lives.
Charles B. Strozier has crafted a unique and powerful blend of shattering personal narratives and thoughtful analysis. Anyone who wonders what 9/11 was like for those who experienced it up close will find Strozier's work the necessary reference. No other author possesses his blend of psychological insight, cultural and historical perspective, and narrative fluency. The intimately personal and profoundly historical mingle to produce a profound understanding of the human and cultural impact of the day America changed forever.
This book offers a way of understandingof taking measure, of coming to terms witha thing that does not lend itself to any other kind of telling. That's why it is special. It issues from a richly layered mind.
Strozier has given us a whole, complex view of 9/11 in a way no other book has. He blends historical, clinical, cultural, and personal perspectives in order to conceptualize how and why 9/11 changed American history. It is a book every American should read.
The atrocity of 9/11 did not burn and bury as many as the Holocaust, nor did it hit with the massive force of Hiroshima's black rain and wind, but Until the Fires Stopped Burning shows how these two horrors took part to produce a psychological and political tsunami that shook America to its core and continues to change the world. In the spirit of John Hersey's Hiroshima and Elie Weisel's Night, but with the rigor of a scientist, historian, and psychotherapist, Strozier tells a gripping and honest tale. The mostly ordinary people of this book, who happened upon an extraordinary event, did not encounter ordinary, plain death. They saw instead an apocalyptic landscape of vast, collective suffering closer to the end of the world. Yet this book also offers a heartening apologue of healing and recovery among the fellowship of New Yorkers.