The Only Plane in the Sky,
Absolutely mesmerizing - must read.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/11/759742836/the-only-plane-in-the-sky-offers-a-powerful-graphic-narrative-of-9-11
That title is actually incorrect. There were two planes in the sky. I know this because, besides Air Force One, the other plane was bringing organs from Alaska to Seattle for emergency transplant into my waiting brother. They got special dispensation for the flight due to the urgency, and a fighter jet escort. It was a miserable, miserable day, sitting in the hospital cafeteria watching terrifying news coverage while my brother’s transplant surgery was happening upstairs.
But “the only plane in the sky” does make for a better title.
Jeez, talk about nerve wracking! I hope he is doing fine now!
My mother had died 3 days before and I was just numb to everything.
Wow that’s up close and personal. Have you read the book.?
One of the most intense reads ever for me…very interesting approach to the event and VERY thorough work getting all the quotes from the hundreds, maybe thousands he presented…some heart wrenching or jaw dropping or both.
No, haven’t read the book, just reacting to the premise behind the title.
I can’t tell - is this some kind of graphic novel? Or just narrative?
Sounds interesting.
Narrative…with the personal recollections of hundreds from the top officials to to fire fighters to the survivors.
immediately after the first plane hits…survivors recounting
Vanessa Lawrence: When the blast hit, the first thing that came into my head was, Did I leave my tote by an electrical socket? It was that horrible thing, Oh, my God! How am I going to explain this? Even going down the stairs, it was still, Was this me? What if this is my fault?
Anthony R. Whitaker, World Trade Center (WTC) commander, PAPD, North Tower ground-level lobby: I saw two people out of the corner of my left eye. They were on fire. They ran toward me, and then they ran right past me. They issued no sound. All their clothes were burnt off, and they were smoldering.
David Kravette: One of the girls who worked with me, Lauren Manning, was coming into the lobby when that fireball came down, and it took her through the glass. She was burned over 80 percent of her body and survived. If I was 20 yards further along in my walk, I would be dead or severely burned. There was no fire afterwards. It literally exploded out, burned itself out, and disappeared within seconds. It was three, four, five seconds at most.
Harry Waizer: The elevator started to fall. It burst into flames. I had a briefcase, a cloth briefcase, in my hand, and I was using it to try to beat out the flames. I was burned on my legs and on my arms. The elevator initially was plummeting, then an emergency system kicked in, because it started gliding. As it was going, I got hit in the face by a fireball that came in through the gap between the elevator doors and the body of the elevator. I have this impression of this orange ball coming at my face and a sensation—I can’t call it a burning—of it making contact and then it was gone.
Short vignettes often woven together
5+ stars! Most powerful audio book I’ve ever listened to . I have no words to adequately describe how impactful this book is.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER . “This is history at its most immediate and moving…A marvelous and memorable book.”
The Only Plane in the Sky is a unique, profound and searing exploration of humanity on a day that changed the course of
The stories are raw, painful and incredibly difficult. Only a few have happy endings. I had to pause the book several times to collect my thoughts. I cried frequently. That’s a testament to how Graff structured the book, its phenomenal narration, and the fact that it is an oral history.
and some dark humour
Brian Montgomery, director of advance, White House: As soon as we landed, Mark Rosenker—director of the White House Military Office—and I went off the back stairs. There’s this guy who looks like Gen. Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove—big guy, all decked out in a bomber jacket. He was straight out of central casting. We said, “What do you need?” He said, “See those planes? Every one is loaded with nukes—tell me where you want ’em.” We looked over and there were rows of B-52s, wingtip to wingtip. I joked, “Gosh, don’t tell the president!”
I’d agree with the superlatives. The amount of work that went into this is hard to comprehend.
Good info here
Diamond: The History of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair Matthew Hart
The story of diamond mining from the South African diamond rush in the 1800s to the conflict diamond controversy in the 1990s. (The book was written around the year 2000 so doesn’t go into the rise of artificial diamonds)
Well-written and interesting book
Finished Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty–excellent depiction of setting, but otherwise not her best work, in my opinion; and Obitchuary: The Big Hot Book of Death, by Spencer Henry and Madison Reyes. Interesting, but if you’re in need of trigger warnings, much of this work is filled with body horror.
Still reading Adventures for Readers (Book One), edited by Fannie Safie.
Next up: TreeNotes: A Year in the Company of Trees, by Nalini Nadkarni, and Bury the Bishop, a cozy mystery by Kate Gallison.
I just finished Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. It really went places, literally and figuratively, I did not expect! I enjoyed it quite a bit, Weir has a good narrative voice and a wonderful sense of humor. I will graba copy of The Martian later this year.
You are in for a treat!, IMHO The Martian is far better than Project Hail Mary (I like both, but I love The Martian)
It’s on my list!
The Martian is great.
I finished How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide by Frank Hyman. It was far better than a discount store purchase ought to be. Hyman is authoritative, believable, and humorous all at the same time. It almost makes me want to go out and search for edible mushrooms. Almost.
Now I’m on to Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed. I saw it at a library book sale. I’d just finished one of her audiobooks (see below), and I’ve read several books about Jack the Ripper. She claims to have sewn the case up (you should pardon the expression), so I had to read it. I’m maybe 1/3 of the way through. She makes an interesting case, though I see from the internet that there’s plenty of skepticism. Her candidate is artist Walter Sickert. She’s not the first to point the finger at him, but she is a good writer and makes a good case for the prosecution. I’ll withold judgment until I finish.
One thing I note is that all of the books about identifying Jack the Ripper identify him with a well-known and well-documented individual – Dr. Gull, or the Duke of Clarence, or arsenic poison victim James Maybrick (or his brother), or artist Walter Sickert. My gut feeling is that it’s much more likely to be some relatively obscure individual (and plenty of them have been suggested as candidates), rather than a well-known one.
I just finished Cornwell’s Unnatural Death on audio. I’d never read any of her other novels, so this was a departure. But the intense cutting-edge high tech crime made this feel closer to the Clive Cussler or Lincoln Child/Douglas Preston audiobooks I’m used to. It’s well-written, but it felt too much as if she was playing around too much with petty details rather than solving the case, and she kept piling detail upon detail and having more things happen without anything getting solved., even up to the end of the ninth CD in a 10 CD audiobook, which felt a little too congested. Everything was finally solved and wrapped up, but it was a busy last disc.
One interesting thing is that all her main characters are female, including the villains. There are a couple of interesting male characters (although Scarpetta’s husband is offstage most of the time, and virtually a cipher). It’s an inversion of the usual male author having mostly male characters with a couple of interesting and eccentric female ones.
Now I’m listening to Msarylinne K. Roach’s Six Women of Salem, about the Salem witchcraft trials. I’ve read many nooks on the topic (I’ve even dragged myself through Rev. Samuel Wentworth Upham’s two-volume opus),. Even though this book is over a decade old, it feels very new because it contains a lot of newer research that I haven’t seen before, and delves deeply into the lives of six of the accused, telling their stories from long before they got to Salem. It also gives a good chronological telling of the story, which a lot of books ignore in trying to group discussions on other bases. I have to admit that I wasn’t even aware of the hearings in Boston – most books restrict themselves to the Salem bench. She also cites Chadwick Hansen, whose book Witchcraft in Salem is too often ignored or sidelined. (There are iffy things in Hansen, but much of what he says is sound.) I’m almost done with this one.
On, yeah. I picked up another book yesterday that looks great – Norse Mythology for Bostonians by Rowdy Geirsson. “A Translation of the Impudent Edda”. Published, to my amazement, by Penguim (well, the Puffin Carcass branch, anyway). It looks like one of the Penguin editions of the Eddas or Sagas, with its mostly black cover and with an illustration of Odin from and 18th century Icelandic manuscript.
But the back cover reads:
This promises to be as much fun as Jane Sibley’s Norse Mythology According to Uncle Einar (and its sequel)
The Martian is great.
yup - movie and book. 
Another fan of The Martian here.
Finally finished Adventures for Readers (Book One), edited by Fannie Safie, which has some excellent choices. The best, other than ones I’ve already read, was “An Eyewitness Account” by Jack London, which is about the San Francisco earthquake. Powerful stuff.
Also finished "TreeNotes: A Year in the Company of Trees*, by Nalini Nadkarni, which had some great tree trivia (treevia?) Bury the Bishop, a cozy mystery by Kate Gallison, which was okay.
Next up: Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow, poems by Jesse Stuart, The Misfit Soldier, science fiction by Michael Mammay, and enough is enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, by Gabe Henry.
Finished “Into Thin Air”. It was even more horrifyingly tragic than I had remembered.
Started the latest Renee Ballard novel - The Waiting - by Michael Connelly.
What are the odds the guy that survived would be one of the best journalistic writers of our time?
I know a lot has come out since, questioning his memory of events, but… That’s how trauma works. As a precisely accurate recounting of events, probably no. But as an honest portrayal of trauma and survivor’s guilt, it’s really unmatched.
For sure. The first time I read it, I thought the author was just a climber tourist, unaware that he had a long history of mountaineering. He made it very clear that his account of events was clouded by exhaustion, oxygen deprivation, altitude sickness, hypothermia and trauma, and that it was pieced together by his memory and accounts by others. I think he took a lot of misguided criticism for what he wrote. If nothing else, it is a cautionary tale to anyone thinking of trying it and it points out the brutal nature of what happens when one is truly faced with life or death.
I thought his book Into the Wild was good, too. It’s about an unusually isolated young man who died in the Alaskan wilderness.