The Terror Dream Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America |
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Author:
| Faludi, Susan |
ISBN: | 978-0-8050-8692-8 |
Publication Date: | Oct 2007 |
Publisher: | Scribe Publications
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Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | AUD $49.95 |
Book Description:
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of Backlashcomes 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...
More Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of Backlashcomes 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 Dreamshows what 9/11 revealed about us-and offers the opportunity to look at ourselves.