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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 Prizeβwinning journalist and bestselling author of Backlashβan unflinching dissection of the mind of America after 9/11 In this most original examination of Americaβs post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the countryβs 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 βtraditionalβ 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 βsecurity moms,β swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the βrescueβ of a female soldier cast as a βhelpless little girlβ? 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 βbarbariansβ 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 usβand offers the opportunity to look at ourselves anew.
 Media BuzzTalk of the Nation - August 27, 2008
Fresh Air - NPR - November 6, 2007
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