9/11, sans the flag waving.

Perhaps it is just me, but I really wish that Farrar, Straus and Giroux would have issued the hardcover version of William Langewiesche's perceptively written American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center with the cover that eventually appeared on the paperback version. Not only is the paperback just more aestetically appealling in every way, but the gaping hole contrasting the soaring towers revealed by the depth mapping underscores the alien world Langewiesche discovers at what has become one of the most emotionally charged sections of real estate on earth. Langewiesche was the only journalist allowed full access to the World Trade Center site, chronicling the efforts to dismantle what amounts to the world's largest Jenga puzzle. But the central struggle goes far beyond the task of untangling WTC steel. Langewiesche writes of the tense encounters between civilian engineers, firefighters and police officers over the respect given (or lack of it) to the bodies of the victims. In the meantime, though, they manage to accomplish the heroic task of dismantiling the pile without losing any more lives.

Originally written for a three part series in The Atlantic Monthly, American Ground is a sensitive narrative of the uneasy future of the trade center site. The battles between the various parties and the very might needed to unbuild the site mirrors the urge to move on and rebuild versus the need to grieve. As of late, the tendency to claim the events of September 11, 2001 for various political motives or as a means of dicisiveness. Langewiesche avoids this by approaching this touchy subject with well-crafted prose that doesn't lag or devolve into patriotic inanity. The story of what happened at Ground Zero after the towers fell is just as revealing as the events during the attacks, and Langewiesche offers an intelligent perspective worth considering before we decide where we go from here.