Volume 50, Number 7 · May 1, 2003
Battleground Zero
By Michael Tomasky
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
by William Langewiesche
North Point Press, 205 pp., $22.00
For a while—at least a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center—it was impossible to resist the rush of dispatches from what was immediately given the name 'ground zero.'[1] Article after article extolled the bravery of this firehouse or that cop. Spare, touching biographies of the lost and deceased—the Little League coaches and church deaconesses and obsessed Giants fans—began appearing in The New York Times, which later collected them under the rubric 'Portraits of Grief.' Paeans to the excellent behavior of Rudy Giuliani were echoed again and again. Much of the coverage was, for a while, deeply affecting. But in due course the surfeit of pathos began to produce in many readers or viewers exactly the opposite of the intended effect. Just as the footage of the towers' collapse seen for the thousandth time ceased to shock, so too did the thousandth tale of the heroics of the firehouse or of the nobility of Mayor Giuliani begin to pall. So much ground zero reportage came to sound less like journalism and more like an extended therapy session.
Review, 4840 words
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