Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story (Review)

     We were married three days before 9/11 in Santa Rosa, California.  So much joy.  Then our world came crashing down the day of September 11th early in the morning in San Francisco.  We were working out in the hotel when we saw the news on the television.  I found myself on my knees crying, just like you see in the movies.  I was in shock along with the rest of the world.  But my shock was somehow closer.

     Our home at the time was in downtown Manhattan, three blocks from the World Financial Center.  The twin towers filled our south facing view.  How could this be happening?  This was my neighborhood, my world.  We eventually were able to go on our honeymoon but came back to our apartment 6 weeks later to be dropped off 6 blocks from our building to the smell of acrid smoke still lingering in the air.  (There was no vehicle access any closer to our building at the time.)  We walked the six blocks dragging our suitcases behind us as our tears blurred our vision.

    Nora Raleigh Baskin's phenomenal new book, Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story brought me back to this time of grief and jarring reality.  She chronicles four children from all different areas of the United States during the two days before 9/11.  You get to know the characters intimately and feel your heart tugging for them.  Her writing is utterly breathtaking.  "It sent a plume of dark smoke up into the sky, charcoal black into the robin's-egg blue of the once most perfect day."  The children later meet up at the memorial one year after 9/11.  Baskin's describes one of the boys' reaction, "It had made him more afraid and less afraid, both.  There was so much to mourn, and so much to be proud of, so many reasons to be at this memorial."  

    I still live and teach in this area.  My three daughters know the memorial intimately.  Our new apartment is 2 blocks south of the memorial now.  We see these lights each year out our window.  In fact, we started adoption proceedings for our first daughter when we were displaced citizens in California after our wedding.  We call Liza-Rae our 9/11 baby.  Each year we see the lights and walk by the flags that are put up in Battery Park to commemorate this horrific event and to remember the people we lost.  Baskin's words so describe my experience, "Above, the flags snapped like whips, and the crooning of the wind harmonized with the steady sound of human crying."  





     Baskin's book is a work of art.  She captures the mixed feelings and emotions surrounding this devastating event in American history.  Yet at the same time she gives us hope.  Through her characters she paints a picture of "oneness" of a humanity that shares feelings and beliefs, who is more alike than different.  It is a message our children so desperately need to hear in our world today.