Volume 53, Number 14 · September 21, 2006
September 11 at the Movies
By Daniel Mendelsohn
United 93
a film directed by Paul Greengrass
World Trade Center
a film directed by Oliver Stone
At a quarter to nine on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was driving down the West Side Highway in Manhattan in a car filled with scholarly texts about Greek tragedy. It was a Tuesday, and the first session of the seminar I used to teach each fall at Princeton, 'Self and Society in Classical Greek Drama,' was scheduled to meet on Thursday. Because I'd recently been given a big new office, I had decided to move all of my classics texts from my apartment in New York down to Princeton; which is why, at around eight that morning, I could be found in front of my building on the Upper West Side, loading boxes of books with titles like Tragedy and Enlightenment and The Greeks and the Irrational into a friend's car. After I'd finished, I got in the car and headed south toward lower Manhattan, where the friend who was going to accompany me to New Jersey lived.
Review, 3801 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |