A review by almartin
The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff

4.0

lol I have somehow aged into the demographic that reads 9/11 history books (new york area history dads). this was pretty engrossing, honestly. it's a straight ahead retelling of one day, 9/11/2001 (nothing before, essentially nothing after). gives you a much different perspective on the day than the geopolitical stuff - turns out that there's just a lot of sorrow and weird disruption caused by two 100-story buildings (and a 48-story building!) collapsing into lower manhattan. whole companies essentially vanished. people had to get back home to summit and westchester and wherever, but no trains were running (and they were covered in building dust). lots of weird happenstance and detail that makes a day that once felt omnipresent immediate again. the lady who was laid off from her job @ WTC on the afternoon of sept 10th is a representative odd wrinkle documented Only Plane in the Sky:

Oddly enough, because I was laid off in the afternoon on September 10th, and because the Human Resources Department all died, I was never taken off the payroll. I went back to work again—it’s not like they had to rehire me. I was never gone.