Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind The Images of 9/11

WATCHING THE WORLD CHANGE: THE STORIES BEHIND THE IMAGES OF 9/11: David Friend: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: 2006: Nonfiction: 435 pgs.

This is an amazing book for those who want to break free from the complacency of collective grief and allow themselves to appreciate individual suffering.

Like everyone else, I watched the newscasts over and over, ad infinitum, all day long on September 11, 2001. I’ve seen the images, photographs and journal articles that documented the catastrophe. I know about 9/11. But like many, the mass murder was just that—a "mass" murder. I don’t know anyone who lost their life. I don’t know anyone who even knows anyone who lost their life. It was horrific, but not on a specific, personal level. But David Friend changes that. Instead of merely knowing about 9/11, Friend allows you to know it.

David Friend, director of the documentary "9/11", collects hundreds of personal stories in "Watching the World Change"--a book which allows those on the periphery to know. In documentary style, Friend helps us know the affect of terrorism. He shares tiny details from the lives of the victims, their friends, and their families. He creates an inside, intimate perspective of each minute leading up to the attack, and then the minutes, hours, and days following it. Friend pieces the narrative vignettes together in a manner that illuminates the terror from numberless angles. He covers the fall of the Twin Towers, the Pennsylvania crash, the Pentagon disaster…everything. He even includes some of the more well known photos of Ground Zero, while explaining how each photographer and photograph came to be.

‘Never Forget’--the epitaph some people attribute to that day--seems to have been Friend’s mantra. And for me, while reading story after story, the people killed by the terrorist attacks have become more than just 'stories'. "Watching the World Change" makes it impossible to forget.

DLA