If the editors and authors of The Age of Terror and How Did This Happen? seek to explain September 11, in effect, to themselves--to those who take as a given a world led by a benign United States, in other words--those who compiled and contributed to the other three books are accustomed to their marginalization as critics of the prevailing world order. They might well be living in a parallel universe.

In ascending order of marginalization, After 9/11: Solutions for a Saner World emerges from the San Francisco-based Independent Media Institute. Among its contributors are many who have written for this magazine, including its editor, and such stars of the progressive punditocracy as Barbara Ehrenreich, Jim Hightower and Arianna Huffington. It's in many ways the most comfortable to me of these books, more critical of the existing world order than the "expert" editions but more engaged with it than the other two volumes. But it left less of an impression on me, as well. While there is some overlap between it and September 11 and the U.S. War: Beyond the Curtain of Smoke (for example, Barbara Kingsolver, Arundhati Roy and Michael Klare appear in both), the latter volume, published by City Lights Books and Freedom Voices, delivers us an angrier, more sectarian left--the kind of book that contains an oil pipeline map and ends with a poem telling us that the planes that crashed on September 11 were made by "the same billionaire wing-makers whose jets burned the sky over Baghdad, Panama City, Grenada, the Mekong." September 11 and the U.S. War, like After 9/11, consists almost entirely of brief, Op-Ed-length articles that have appeared elsewhere. Unlike After 9/11 (which is dedicated to "the everyday heroes who rose to the challenge of 9/11"), there is barely room in this volume for a nod to the human toll--in the United States, anyway--of the violence inflicted on that day. The editors and authors get straight to business in stating their "dissent from the bellicose actions" taken by the United States, exposing, as they talk about Eduardo Galeano, author of the lead essay, the "fundamental falsehoods of US militarism and its mirrored evils abroad."

The third of the books by the marginalized, Another World Is Possible, was produced by six activists in their 20s affiliated with the Active Element Foundation. If After 9/11 is Tracy Chapman, and September 11 and the U.S. War is Pete Seeger, Another World Is Possible is Rage Against the Machine. The contributors are trying, in the words of Kofi Taha's brief foreword, to "find a language that evokes love, compassion and critical thought in the face of tragedy," and to recognize "this pivotal moment in human history that will either positively propel us forward or plunge us in ever-deepening despair."

One of the positive things about Another World Is Possible is the way the editors disagree with one another--two of them even question whether its subtitle, "Conversations in a Time of Terror," is too "American-centric." Walidah Imarisha, an artist, poet and "rabble-rouser," doesn't like it because "it's been a time of terror for folks of color, in and out of this country, for centuries." Shaffy Moeel, a former reporter for youth radio, thinks Americans should understand that terror is what is faced by 25 million Africans with HIV who can't afford treatment drugs and by Iraqi children deprived of food and medicine. And the authors here don't always take themselves as seriously as some others on the left: It's refreshing to read that Beka Economopoulos, another of the editors and a trainer for the Ruckus Society, avoided the "sectarian and process-heavy" meetings called by the left in the days after September 11.

Another thing that makes this book more compelling than its counterparts is the contribution of Jeremy Glick, a graduate student at Rutgers and one of the editors. On the one hand, much of his writing seems as "sectarian and process-heavy" as any in the collection's pages (and there is plenty of that). On the other, Glick's father was killed in Tower One on September 11, and he writes movingly of what happened to him in the weeks afterward when he experienced a "complete collapse of the public/private."

Another World Is Possible is also more original and graphically lively than any of the other books, containing interviews, photographs and even a running e-mail exchange among the editors, begun on September 11 when several of them weren't sure whether the Jeremy Glick among the casualties was their friend and contemporary or his father.

One way to measure the appeal of these books--or any, really--is whether they manage to surprise us, or tell us something we didn't know. In After 9/11, I was surprised to find peace activist Riane Eisler, president of the Center for Partnership Studies, telling interviewer Helen Knode that she supports a "military response against terrorist bases in nations that fund and support terrorism," because "if you've got a psychopath lunging at you with a knife, that's not the time to talk about peace and love." I was informed, if somewhat amused, by Dr. Michael Bader's examination of the post-September 11 "terror sex" phenomenon--that "some of us get turned on by disasters...because disasters make us unconsciously feel safe to be sexual." (That made me wish they were still making new Seinfelds--oh, the possibilities!)

In Another World Is Possible, I was taken with the editors' ability to unearth quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. that have been largely forgotten in the process of his near-canonization, like these lines from his 1967 Riverside Church sermon: "I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.