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Rating: 
Summary: "Stay Human"
Review: Ellis Avery's The Smoke Week is an extraordinary book. By turns telegraphic, conversational, intimate, and lyrical -- even, around the edges, a little funny -- she writes of the first hours and days after the destruction of the World Trade Center with an attention to detail and a refusal of cliché that puts most other accounts of those days to shame. It's as though, right there downtown with disaster coming on, she began to observe as carefully and compassionately as she possibly could, to keep herself sane -- and the fine sentences here, the precisely rendered stories, are the result.I see a bumper sticker sometimes in San Francisco: STAY HUMAN. The pressure, nowadays, in the jingoistic frenzy of the so-called "war on terror," is to become something else, "patriots" or "dissidents," or some other super-charged category. But Avery's book is a reminder that, on September 11, 2001, the people in downtown New York weren't just "America Under Attack," or some other hollow slogan; her prose makes you see something like the human experience of that day. That's no small achievement; and I can't recommend this book enough.
Rating:
Summary: No words to say what a gem this book is
Review: I completely agree with the other reviewers that this book is *not* one of those "let's celebrate the heroes" books about the World Trade Center Attacks. Instead, it's a beautiful, spare-but-luxurious, honest memoir of the day it happened and about a week afterward. I stopped counting the number of times I started crying because something Avery wrote was *exactly* the way I remember feeling. The writing is absolutely gorgeous, but the real draw of the book is the humanity. In 20 years, *this* is the book people will read to understand the effects of September 11, 2001 on the people of New York City.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful. moving.
Review: I read this book slowly: it was too compelling to not want to read, too beautiful to stop and too hard to read in one swallow. It is personal and intimate. But it gives a much deeper appreciation of not only one woman's experience of that trauma, but also what the nation must have felt. I recommend it to anyone who wants a personal account of that time. Something much deeper, more heartfelt and ultimately more sane and thoughtful than any kind of "war on terror" reactionary work that might be out there.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful. moving.
Review: I read this book slowly: it was too compelling to not want to read, too beautiful to stop and too hard to read in one swallow. It is personal and intimate. But it gives a much deeper appreciation of not only one woman's experience of that trauma, but also what the nation must have felt. I recommend it to anyone who wants a personal account of that time. Something much deeper, more heartfelt and ultimately more sane and thoughtful than any kind of "war on terror" reactionary work that might be out there.
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