'A brilliant, unsentimental, often darkly humorous account of America's nervous breakdown after 9/11.' Publishers Weekly starred boxed review From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the international bestselller Backlash - an unflinchingly critical and strikingly original dissection of the mind and soul of America since 9/11.
Susan Faludi's new book is a brilliantly revealing explanantion of the soul and psyche of the United States. Taking America's psychological response to the 9/11 attacks as her optic, Faludi places the attacks in a wider context of the history of America's experience of power and vulnerability.
Observing the responses to 9/11 of the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why did Americans respond to an assault against their global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore 'traditional' manhood, marriage and maternity? Why did they react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fuelled by hatred of Western emancipation lead them to a regressive fixation on 'Doris Day' womanhood and 'John Wayne' masculinity, with trembling mothers, swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the 'rescue' of a female soldier, Jessica Lynch, cast as a 'helpless little girl'?
The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a uniquely American historical anomaly: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults on town and village by non-white 'barbarians'. That historical sense of humiliation lies concealed beneath a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame loom. The Terror Dream is a powerfully original and crucial examination of what 9/11 revealed about America.
'Susan Faludi [is] a relentless reporter, an unapologetic feminist and a brilliant scourge... This splendid provocation of a book, [keeps] company with Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing...and Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore.' New York Times
