The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about America

New
Paperback
2008
$21.65

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Non-fiction, 2008
'A brilliant, unsentimental, often darkly humorous account of America's nervous breakdown after 9/11.' -- Publishers Weekly *starred review*
In this remarkable and strikingly original examination of America post-9/11, Susan Faludi shines a light on the psychological response to the attacks. Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why did Americans respond to an assault against their global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore 'traditional' manhood, marriage and maternity? Why did they react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fuelled by hatred of Western emancipation lead them to a regressive fixation on 'Doris Day' womanhood and 'John Wayne' masculinity, with trembling mothers, swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the 'rescue' of a female soldier, Jessica Lynch, cast as a 'helpless little girl'?
The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a uniquely American historical anomaly: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults on town and village by non-white 'barbarians'. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms. The Terror Dream is a brilliant and important new look at what 9/11 revealed about America.

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Non-fiction, 2008

'A brilliant, unsentimental, often darkly humorous account of America's nervous breakdown after 9/11.' -- Publishers Weekly *starred review*

In this remarkable and strikingly original examination of America post-9/11, Susan Faludi shines a light on the psychological response to the attacks. Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why did Americans respond to an assault against their global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore 'traditional' manhood, marriage and maternity? Why did they react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fuelled by hatred of Western emancipation lead them to a regressive fixation on 'Doris Day' womanhood and 'John Wayne' masculinity, with trembling mothers, swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the 'rescue' of a female soldier, Jessica Lynch, cast as a 'helpless little girl'?

The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a uniquely American historical anomaly: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults on town and village by non-white 'barbarians'. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms. The Terror Dream is a brilliant and important new look at what 9/11 revealed about America.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 368
Edition: Main - Print on Demand
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 01 Mar 2008
ISBN 10: 1843547791
ISBN 13: 9781843547792
Book Overview: 'A brilliant, unsentimental, often darkly humorous account of America's nervous breakdown after 9/11.' Publishers Weekly starred boxed review From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the international bestselller Backlash - an unflinchingly critical and strikingly original dissection of the mind and soul of America since 9/11.

Media Reviews

'Susan Faludi has written a brilliant, unsentimental, often darkly humorous account of America's nervous breakdown after 9/11' Publishers Weekly 'This is a book that had to be written, and only Susan Faludi could do it so brilliantly and engrossingly.' Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed 'Blistering and brilliant, The Terror Dream is cultural criticism at its best.' Peter Biskind, author of Easy Rider, Raging Bulls 'Susan Faludi, as always, is simply stunning. With heroic acuity, she digs through the mythological debris of the Bush era to recover the dark fairytale - shades of white savagery on the early Frontier - that founds the vengeance fantasy we call the war on terrorism .' Mike Davis

Author Bio

Susan Faludi is the author of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man and Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Nation, among other publications. She lives in San Francisco.