Book Summary and Reviews of The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi

The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi

The Terror Dream

Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America

by Susan Faludi

  • Critics' Consensus (1):
  • Published:
  • Oct 2007, 368 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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 acute 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 gunslingers, and the “rescue” of a female soldier cast as a “helpless little girl”?

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Susan Faludi has written a brilliant, unsentimental, often darkly humorous account of America's nervous breakdown after 9/11." - Publishers Weekly.

"Starred Review. In the conclusion of this insightful book, Faludi laments how all the myth-making has squandered opportunities to critically examine the flaws in American foreign and domestic policy." - Booklist.

"Brilliant, illuminating and essential. " - Kirkus Reviews.

This information about The Terror Dream was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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