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Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
Metropolitan Books
October 2007
On Sale: October 2, 2007
368 pages
ISBN: 0805086927
EAN: 9780805086928
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling
author of Backlash—an unflinching dissection of the mind of
America after 9/11
In this most original examination of America’s post-9/11
culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country’s
psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day.
Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular
culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely
acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with
baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture
respond to an assault against American global dominance with
a frenzied summons to restore “traditional” manhood,
marriage, and maternity? Why did we react as if the
hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice
but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fueled by
hatred of Western emancipation lead us to a regressive
fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity,
with trembling “security moms,” swaggering presidential
gunslingers, and the “rescue” of a female soldier cast as a
“helpless little girl”?
The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly
unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent
memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was
forged in traumatizing assaults by nonwhite “barbarians” on
town and village. That humiliation lies concealed under a
myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is
reanimated whenever threat and shame looms.
Brilliant and important, The Terror Dream shows what 9/11
revealed about us—and offers the opportunity to look at
ourselves anew.
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