The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 - Garrett Graff

I came across mention of Garrett Graff’s The Only Plane in the Sky in a Guardian article discussing books that explored different stages of 9/11 and its aftermath. The list also included the Looming Tower, which I’d read a bit befor,e so it caught my interest, and as I’m a fan of oral histories, I thought I’d give this one a try as well.

Graff builds his narrative using a chorus-like approach, providing snippets of conversations about a similar topic that build on each other, rather than the extended transcripts of discrete conversations favored by Studs Terkel. Context is provided in italics at times, but by far the majority of the text allows participants to speak for themselves, offering a range of viewpoints that includes office workers in the Twin Towers ,the loved ones of the deceased, government officials on the ground scrambling to understand the situation, first responders, and the cadre surrounding the president in the critical hours of the mornign and early afternoon, as he sought to find a safe place to reassure the nation.

There’s not much to say about the writing, considering it is all transcripts, but the book is well-constructed and remains coheren in its narratives, though the individual stories can get a bit murky as we jump back and forth between participants. The overall picture was quite clear, however. This book is an important piece of history and a chronicle of events that feels very immediate. It can be harrowing at times, but is worth a read for those of us who remember the day as distant observers.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Lawrence Wright

It’s strange to remember an event that is so clearly going to be in history books—if it isn’t already. Everybody who lives even a short while sees history at some remove, but it’s sometimes hard to tell what will be remembered and what mostly forgotten. With 9/11, it was clear from the get-go. Much like this year’s COVID pandemic, it formed a clear threshold beyond which many things would never be the same.

The Looming Tower doesn’t spend much time detasiling the attack itself. The planning occurs intermittently over the last quarter of the book, while the event itself is over in ten pages. Instead, Wright’s book chronicles the events and figures that culminated in atrocity. Obviously this includes Bin Laden, whose life features in much of the book’s second half. But there are also figures that I hadn’t heard of before. People like Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic scholar whose uncompromising take on Islam provided rationale for the jihads to come, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian radical bent on overthrowing Mubarek’s secular regime and installing a caliphate. Zawahiri provides an interesting counterpoint to bin Laden, as his intial position of dominance shrinks while bin Laden’s rises, until he is forced to fold his organization into al Qaeda.

American figures also get billing, thoug hthe book is lopsided towards the Islamists. Most notably, it follows John O’Neil, a senior FBI agent who doggedly pursued al Qaeda when it was an obscure fledgling organization in the Arab world and no one outside of that sphere knew about it or cared. O’Neil is an interesting figure, brilliant but flawed, and his final days form a sad counterpoint that would have seemed unbelievable in a novel, but somehow actually happened.

The book is well written, with sleek, unadormed prose and a journalistic eye for detail.