After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era

Written by Steven Brill

Narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris

After is an astounding, inspiring, and exciting account of America in the first year of the September 12th era. Based on 347 on-the-record interviews and revelations from memos of government meetings, court filings and other documents, award winning journalist Steven Brill takes us inside the critical dramas of the year after the September 11 attacks -- from the Justice Department's drive to find terror cells, to Congress's decision to bail out the airline industry, to a Ground Zero real estate mogul's audacious plan to litigate his way to an extra $3.5 billion in insurance proceeds.
In After we go inside the late night audiences that lobbyists get with congressional leaders like Tom DeLay. We're in the White House sub-basement as the mammoth Department of Homeland Security is patched together, agency by agency. And we're in a young widow's living room as she struggles to hold her family together and make sense of the various charities and government funds that may be available to her.
But beyond being a masterpiece of reporting, After is a riveting narrative of people -- some well known, others not known at all -- facing the defining challenge of their lives. As their paths cross in a series of surprising alliances and confrontations, Brill finds in their stories the answer to how America changed and prevailed.
After is an indelible picture of America and Americans battling their way through a time of crisis. And we see that Americans and their country were anything but soft when it came to standing up the morning after.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Apr 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9780743540926

Steven Brill

Steven Brill is the founder of Journalism Online, a company designed to create a new, viable business model for journalism to flourish online.  He is a feature writer for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and TIME.  Brill founded the Yale Journalism Initiative, which recruits and trains journalists.  He founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer Magazine, and Brill's Content Magazine.  He is the author of After: How America Confronted the September 12th Era and The Teamsters.

Reviews for After

[othemts · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A nice cross-section of stories of people directly affected by the September 11th attacks in the first year following the atrocities. Although the author betrays a right-wing perspective and overuses the Sept. 10th/Sept. 12th metaphor, these are some well told stories about our national tragedy.

[travelinlibrarian_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you want to know how the country dealt with the events of September 11th in the year that followed this is the definitive book on the topic. If follows dozens of individuals through that year from victims' families, business owners both small(the owner of a shoe repair shop in NYC) to large (the owner of the twin towers), to those in affected industries (the manager of the Minneapolis airport) to those in government including John Ashcroft and Senator Charles Schumer. It covers both the positives and negatives of issues that arose whether it be how vicitms were being identified, to the changes in views on civil liberties, to victim compensation to insurance. (The question of whether or not the planes striking the World Trade Center was a "single occurrence" or two "events." There was a $3.55 billion difference between those two concepts.) At a whopping 723 pages I finished this book in six days and highly recommend it to everyone.

Here's just one small bit I though was worth sharing:

"One of Ashcroft's closest aids was asked by the author a few days later what protection any American had if someone like Padilla could be arrested on American soil and held secretly just on the government's say so.

"After first correcting his questioner for not using Padilla's Muslim name, he answered, 'Well, I guess his family could speak out if he's missing, and if that creates a political furor, the Pesident would be accountable at the next election.'

"Was that the only protection?

"'That and the good faith of the people who hold these offices,' he replied."