Because We Are Americans: What We Discovered on September 11, 2001
Author: Jesse Kornbluth, Jessica Papin
List Price: $2.95
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ISBN: 0446611980
Publisher: Warner Books (November, 2001)
Sales Rank: 216,224
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
Contributor Review
I happen to have been a contributor to this book, it is located on page 12 of the paperback version of the book. I posted on AOL's message boards at 5 a.m. on 9/13/01 after not sleeping for two days. When I was approached by the author asking permission to reprint my post, I was honored and gladly obliged. A few months later, I got a copy in the mail, inscribed to me with many thanks from the author. Posting that message on AOL was a release of two-days worth of pent-up tension, apprehension and fear. It is now 9/10/03 and I just took out the book to peruse it again and it made me feel proud to be a part of the project. Read the book, judge it for yourselves.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Only Americans are compassionate??
How supremely arrogant to think that we are compassionate "because we are Americans." Don't get me wrong, I'm not jumping on the "hate America" bandwagon, it's just that anyone who follows the news well would know that people in every country pull together in times of crisis. Photos of the embassy bombings in Africa showed scores of people scramling over the wreckage trying to help, photos of a market bombing in Kabul showed a team of six men carrying a bloody stanger to a hospital...etc etc etc To think that compassion is some uniquely American trait is foolish, arrogant and dangerous. When you start thinking your country's citizens are inherently better people you start down the path to Empire. Compassion is not an American trait, it's a human trait. By the way, if we were truly so compassionate we'd have cared about terrorism when they bombed our barracks in Saudi Arabia, destroyed two of our embassies, or nearly sank one of our warships. Sad fact is, it was only news when we started to feel vulnerable at home. Have we learned our lesson? When's the last time you heard someone talk about the current situation in Afghanistan? Now when's the last time you heard someone talk about American Idol?
Rating: 5 out of 5
to the anonymous slanderer
I couldn't let the Emma Goldman quote (fractured and irrelevant as it is) go unchallenged. Her life's work was devoted to the failed political philosophy of anarchism, and as such would likely be a soul-mate to those responsible for the atrocities of September 11. Here is what a somewhat better mind had to say about such things:Neither a life of anarchy nor one beneath a despot should you praise; to all that lies in the middle a god has given excellence. - Aeschylus
The vast majority of those who were murdered on Sept. 11 were just trying to live their lives "in the middle". This book is a simple, thoughtful reminder of that truth.
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