9/11 -- A Meaningful Firsthand Record

This is not a promotional ad. Or a marketing ploy. Or any kind of commercialization.

My husband, a retired FDNY Assistant Chief of Department, collected interviews, found incredible images, and wrote this book to preserve stories of responders. His only desire was to honor these responders by including them in the cultural record.

There are 26 interviews in here — from the Chief of Operations to a secretary at Headquarters, from a seasoned constructed worker to a new firefighter, from the paramedic to the fleet maintenance director. These men and women tell their intensely gripping firsthand accounts of a day that still echoes, and for some of us, haunts, 25 years later.

I write this here to, in my own small way, act as literary steward of this incredible historical contribution to our collective 9/11 remembrances. And, as a teacher, to insure that future generations understand that day through the voices of those who served.

As a writer, I know that relatively few FDNY responders wrote books. The firehouse culture, rightly, values quiet remembrance even of tremendous valor and bravery. Once a year, there’s a Medal Day, and certainly there is an oral culture of passing on stories of heroics. It’s marvelous. And that’s why I love this book so much — it’s cut from the same cloth: there’s a “just-the-facts” quality to every account, using each person’s own wording and speech pattern, that rings so true. For all its gorgeous quality (and the book is gorgeous), it’s humbly significant.

September 11, 2001 is now a generation ago. There are young adults walking the streets of New York who did not live through that morning, who know it only as a chapter in a textbook or a brief classroom discussion. Memory, if it is not tended, recedes. Voices, if they are not present, fade.

This book exists so that does not happen. It offers firsthand testimony — steady, unadorned, simply human — from those who answered the call. As the 25th Anniversary approaches, maybe the most meaningful thing we can do is simply to pay attention again: to read, to listen, and to honor, while the voices of that day are still here to speak.