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    The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
    The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
    The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America

    Written by Susan Faludi

    Narrated by Beth McDonald

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In this most original examination of America's post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country's psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore "traditional" manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did we react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fueled by hatred of Western emancipation lead us to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling "security moms," swaggering presidential gun-slingers, and the "rescue" of a female soldier cast as a "helpless little girl"?

    The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults by non-white "barbarians" on town and village. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms—as they did on September 11.

    Brilliant and important, The Terror Dream shows what 9/11 revealed about us—and offers the opportunity to look at ourselves anew.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateOct 2, 2007
    ISBN9781427202192
    The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
    Author

    Susan Faludi

    Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of The Terror Dream, Stiffed, and Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, she has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, and The Baffler, among other publications.

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    Reviews for The Terror Dream

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      FANTASTIC. That was a thorough indictment of crippling gender roles resurrected post-9/11. Read this book.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating look at America's reaction to the attacks of september 11th, from a feminist perspective. Analysing news reports and bogus stories, including the whole Jessica Lynch saga, Faludi shows convincingly that when the going gets tough, the simplest thing to do is to search for the John Wayne figure - even though, or in fact because, that figure is a mythic one constructed to gloss over the 'shame' of not having been able to protect the homestead sufficiently during white America's expansionist phase.

      Faludi's study focuses on America, but various European allies in the 'war on terror' could well fall under a similar spotlight. When fundamentalist Islam attacks, it seems the best answer some of our leaders can come up with is to lock up their wives/daughters and strut their cowboy credentials.
    • 3/5
      The first half, covering the reaction to 9/11 was very interesting. The second, about reaction to terror in early American history was less so - I skimmed that part.