The Lasting Lesson of the September 11 Victims

Who you are, at the very end.

The writer Garrett Graff, whose newsletter Doomsday Scenario is a must read these days, is a professor at Georgetown and a former editor at Politico. But I know him best for his books. Graff is the author of many history books, but he’s known best for his oral histories, in which he captures pivot moments in American and world history by weaving a kaleidoscope of perspectives, hitting every angle from every angle; you not only learn every little detail, you learn from the people who were experiencing it, while they were experiencing it. There was a boomlet a few years back of online oral histories — they even did one for Deadspin — but they’re not so popular these days, now that no one likes to read anymore. But in book form, I find them magnetic, almost hypnotizing: Done well, like Graff does them, you can feel like you are experiencing everything that is happening while it is happening, like you’re right there in the middle of it. It can feel like it’s happening directly to you.

Graff has written several of these, from an oral history of D-Day (When the Sea Came Alive) to an oral history of the first days of Covid-19 (Life Became Very Blurry) to his newest one, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky, which is about the development and the deployment of the atomic bomb. But the best of them is…