The Terror Dream

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics'' Circle Award for Non-fiction, 2008

''A brilliant, unsentimental, often darkly humorous account of America''s nervous breakdown after 9/11.'' -- Publishers Weekly *starred review*

In this remarkable and strikingly original examination of America post-9/11, Susan Faludi shines a light on the psychological response to the attacks. Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why did Americans respond to an assault against their global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore ''traditional'' manhood, marriage and maternity? Why did they react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fuelled by hatred of Western emancipation lead them to a regressive fixation on ''Doris Day'' womanhood and ''John Wayne'' masculinity, with trembling mothers, swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the ''rescue'' of a female soldier, Jessica Lynch, cast as a ''helpless little girl''?

The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a uniquely American historical anomaly: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults on town and village by non-white ''barbarians''. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms. The Terror Dream is a brilliant and important new look at what 9/11 revealed about America.