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Monday, September 11, 2006

September Buzz

Follow this link to our September BHPL Buzz, our library email newsletter, which is also linked to our webpage http://www.bhplnj.org/bhplbuzz.pdf
This month's book display features books about 9/11. A partial booklist can be seen in the BHPL Buzz.
Take a look at St.Paul Pioneer Press movie critic, Chris Hewitt's article about 9/11 books and movies at this link.
Here is an excerpt from the column:
"9/11-themed books, movies worth checking out
BY CHRIS HEWITT

Movie Critic (St. Paul Pioneer Press)
My job required me to see many 9/11-themed movies, but somehow I've also become a voracious consumer of 9/11 nonfiction and fiction. I'm skipping the much-discussed quick responses such as "Fahrenheit 9/11," but here are a batch of recent books and movies worth checking out:
BOOKS
"102 Minutes," by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn: If you're going to read one book about 9/11, this is it. Using interviews with survivors, cell-phone calls from inside the World Trade Center and astonishingly detailed reporting, this heartbreaking, compulsively readable work of nonfiction makes you feel like you are there, awed and inspired by the heroism and sacrifice that occurred between the time when a plane slammed into the first tower and when the last tower fell.
"A Little Love Story," by Roland Merullo: It wouldn't be fair to say how this aptly titled charmer connects to the events of 9/11, but it's not giving away too much to say the novel offers hope by showing how life can go on in the wake of tragedy.
"Between Two Rivers," by Nicholas Rinaldi: The rivers are the Hudson and the East River, which converge near what's now Ground Zero. Rinaldi creates a dozen vivid characters who refer to 9/11 only obliquely but who also live their lives between two metaphoric rivers, as well: the future and the irretrievable past.
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," by Jonathan Safran Foer: Surprisingly witty picaresque story about a guy trying to put together the pieces of his life, with his father's key, retrieved from the World Trade Center wreckage, to guide him.
"The Looming Tower," by Lawrence Wright: What if the CIA and FBI had met, three months prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center, possessing the information needed to stop the attacks but refusing to share it with each other? Well, they did (on June 11, 2001), and Wright's riveting nonfiction account of the rise of al-Qaida argues convincingly that the attacks should have been prevented.
"Triangle," by Katharine Weber: This novel about the last survivor of New York's 1911 Triangle Factory fire does not appear to be about 9/11, but its connections to the World Trade Center go way beyond the coincidental similarity of the dates. In the lyrical final pages, Weber imagines a compelling, oddly hopeful answer to one of the most horrifying questions of that day: How could people bring themselves to jump?

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