As someone who lived through this event and watched it happen on television, this was a hard book to listen to. This attack happened when I was in the fourth grade (9 years old). A teacher came into our class to notify us that an attack had a happend and told us to turn on the tv because we were one of the only classes that had a TV. The second plane had already hit and we sat there and watched what enfolded afterwards. While this memory is vivid, at the time I didn’t understand the full impact of what was happening. I knew it was bad but not the full extent of what it meant long term. I would of course learn more about that as I grew older and I saw how this impacted the world and the full details start to emerge over the next few years. 

Listening to this book as an adult, gave me a better sense of how chaotic this event was for NY and our country. It also gave me an idea of how people reacted at the time of the first plane hitting and how that changed as the situation unfolded. This goes over each aspect of the attack by each plane, the collapses, and the aftermath. It made it very easy to follow the sequence of events, especially as someone who only saw this from the news, which didn’t have the full picture at the time. 

The narration of this was wonderful and emotional. We get the story from actual interviews from the people who survived, the family left behind, reporters, government officials, students, and so many more people. The only issue with this audio format for people could be the fluctuation in audio because it is a bunch of different narrators, but it didn’t really bother me. It was worth it to hear the emotion in their voice and feel how much this event affected them, and still affects them today. I will say, a lot of the chapters were very hard to listen to because of people getting emotional describing what happened, like the jumper chapter. I got choked up quite a few times. 

Overall, I highly recommend this book because you get a well rounded sense of how this attack affected the world. I lived through this event but still learned a lot from this book.