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Shop nowThe Terror Dream
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Learn moreIn 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.
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.
Beth McDonald is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winner and has read a number of audiobooks including Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream, Sandra Brown's Sunny Chandler's Return, Tami Hoag's Dark Horse, and Elisabeth Hyde's The Abortionist's Daughter.
McDonald, a Juilliard graduate, has appeared across the country in regional theatre productions of plays by Shakespeare, Neil Simon, Sophocles, Arthur Miller, Moliere, A.R.Gurney, Euripides, and others. Her Broadway credits include the original cast of Angels in America, A Few Good Men, and Einstein and the Polar Bear. On television, she has appearances on Law & Order, Third Watch, and The Courtroom as well as recurring roles on All My Children and As the World Turns. She has also appeared in Mona Lisa Smile and several independent feature films.
Reviews
“Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and it shows. Backlash...is punchy, well-written, well researched, convincing, thought-provoking and, in parts, very funny.” —The Guardian on Backlash
“Faludi uses her dazzling investigative powers to zap the smug detractors of feminism, the hypocrites, backsliders, and antifeminists. The result is a rich and juicy read, informed by powerful logic and moral clarity.” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed on Backlash
“Faludi's prose is as strong and smooth as well-sanded hardwood, and she's got a jeweler's eye for the telling detail.” —Chicago Sun Times on Stiffed
“Susan Faludi's Backlash [was] in my view the most important book on women in recent decades....Stiffed is even better than Backlash...It is a significant and serious work...every page counts .” —New York Review of Books on Stiffed