The Terror Dream
Susan Faludi
'[A] persuasive, sophisticated and piercing analysis … If you only ever read one book about September 11, make it this one.'
Fiona Capp (Age)'This is a book that had to be written, and only Susan Faludi could do it so brilliantly and engrossingly.'
Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed)'The Terror Dream is superb. You cannot find a more eye-opening book to read.'
Chalmers Johnson (author of Nemesis)From the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of Backlash comes an unflinching dissection of the mind of America after 9/11 — and of a barely acknowledged society-wide drama shot through with baffling contradictions.
Why, asks Susan Faludi, did the culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore ‘traditional’ manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did it react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery?
Why did an attack fuelled by hatred of Western emancipation lead commentators and the media 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’?
The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the global superpower is also a nation haunted by a centuries-long trauma of assault on its home soil, when it was unable to repel invasions of non-Christian, nonwhite ‘barbarians’ from the homestead door. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms.
Brilliant and important, The Terror Dream unveils the uncomfortable truth about what the reaction to 9/11 revealed about America.
'She makes an eloquent and well-documented case that historical comparisons are valid and enlightening'.
Roy Williams (Weekend Australia )'With her steel trap mind, she poses original and incisive questions about the collective American mentality and the way it responded to an attach on home soil.'
(Sunday Mail Brisbane)'This is a thoughtful contribution to our understanding of this epochal event and its even more horrible aftermath.'
(Examiner)'A brilliant, unsentimental, often darkly humorous account of America’s nervous breakdown after 9/11.'
(Publishers Weekly)'Rich, incisive analysis of the surreality of American life in the wake of 9/11 … Brilliant, illuminating and essential.'
(Kirkus Reviews)'Bold, ambitious, often brilliant ... Faludi persuasively demonstrates that the attack on New York launched a concomitant attack on feminism, unleashing a torrent of regressive sexism in response to a sense of national impotence. The sabre-rattling was hard for anyone to miss, but the degree to which it was also directed domestically, and especially at women, comes as a shock, as does the media's complicity and laxity.'
(Guardian.co.uk)Susan Faludi
Author photo
Russ Fischella
Susan Faludi is the author of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man and Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Nation, among other publications. She lives in San Francisco.
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Extent: 368pp
Size: 234mm x 153mm
ISBN (13): 9781921215926
RRP: $35.00
Pub date: April 2008
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