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Title details for Middletown, America by Gail Sheehy - Available

Middletown, America

One Town's Passage from Trauma to Hope

by Gail Sheehy
ebook
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The single event that we know as 9/11 is over, but the shock waves continue to radiate outward, generated by orange alerts, terrorism lockdowns, and the shrinking of personal liberties we once took for granted. The stories in this book, of real people faced with extraordinary trauma and gradually transcending it, are the best antidote to our fears. Middletown, America is a book of hope.
All Americans were hit with some degree of trauma on September 11, 2001, but no place was hit harder than Middletown, New Jersey. Gail Sheehy spent the better part of two years walking the journey from grief toward renewal with fifty members of the community that lost more people in the World Trade Center than any other outside New York City. Her subjects are the women, men, and children who remained after the devastation and who are putting their lives back to-gether.
Sheehy tells the story of four widowed moms from New Jersey who started out scarcely knowing the difference between the House and the Senate, yet turned their sorrow and anger into action and became formidable witnesses to the failures of the country’s leadership to connect the dots before September 11. Sheehy follows the four moms as they fight White House attempts to thwart the independent commission investigating 9/11 and expose efforts at a cover-up.
What would become of the young wives carrying children their husbands would never see, wives who had watched their dreams literally go up in smoke in that amphitheater of death across the river? Amazingly, each finds her own door to the light. Here, too, is the story of the widow and widower who met in the waiting room of a mental-health agency and brought each other back from the brink of despair across a bridge of love. Sheehy also reveals how bereft mothers who will never have another son or daughter found reasons to recommit to life. And she follows in the footsteps of the robbed children, documenting the incredible resilience of four-year-olds, the anger of teenagers, the courage of sisters and brothers.
Sheehy follows survivors who escaped the burning towers only to find themselves trapped inside a tower of inner torment, from which it took love, family, and faith to free themselves. She is taken into the confi-dence of the night crew at Ground Zero, police officers who worked in that pit for eight months straight and then faced the “returning home” phenomenon. She recounts the confessions of religious leaders who struggled to explain the inexplicable to their flocks. Mental-health professionals confide in her, as do corporate chiefs, educators, friends and neigh-bors, town officials, and volunteers who rose to the occasion and committed themselves to healing their wounded community.
As a journalist who conducted more than nine hundred interviews, Gail Sheehy is an impeccable researcher. As a writer with a novelistic gift, she weaves the individual stories into a compelling narrative. Middletown, America illuminates every stage of a tumultuous passage—from shock, passivity, and panic attacks, to rising anger and deep grieving, and on to the secret romances and startling relapses, the realignment of faith, the return of a capacity to love and be loved, and, finally, the commitment to constructing new lives.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 2, 2003

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781588363190

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781588363190
      • File size: 2753 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 11, 2003
      With nearly 50 victims, the commuter hamlet of Middletown, N.J., and its environs suffered the "largest concentrated death toll" on September 11 of anyplace in America. A "town with no middle," Middletown consists of affluent financiers and working-class police officers and firefighters—two groups that were hit particularly hard in the attacks. Bestselling author Sheehy (Passages; Hillary's Choice; etc.), who spent almost two years observing the residents' reactions to the staggering loss, explores how this high-end suburb, for which the closest thing to a social fabric was a ferocious sensitivity to social status, dealt with the tragedy. Sheehy ignores governmental machinations in order to describe the welter of emotions ordinary Americans experienced. The enemy of cliché is detail—and Sheehy's months in the town yield subtle, detailed portraits that confound easy images of "strength" or "denial" (although those are also present). Sheehy implicitly critiques modern American life: any salutary community bonding suggests a prior lack of cohesion, just as the emphasis on financial assistance tends to obscure more fundamental psychological needs. In a community filled with "prefeminist" housewives, "loss of self" became a substantial problem—who am I, if not this or that victim's spouse? Fortunately, in addition to the considerable generosity the town evinced, survivors were able to form an "intentional family" united by grief. One sometimes hears that everyone "knows" what happened on September 11. This admirable book tells precisely the stories we could stand to hear more about. 8 pages of photos not seen by PW. (Sept. 2)Forecast:More focused than Steven Brill's
      After, and aided by Sheehy's track record and a nine-city tour, this could jump onto bestseller lists. This is a BOMC main selection, and a featured alternate at QPB, the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club. 100,000 first printing.

    • Library Journal

      May 1, 2003
      How Middleton, NJ, copes after September 11, when it lost 50 residents, from Wall Street dads to Port Authority cops.

      Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      August 1, 2003
      Sheehy brings the insightfulness she offered in " Passages" (1976) and " Silent Passage" (1992) to this examination of the traumatic impact of 9/11 on Middletown, New Jersey, which suffered "the largest concentrated death toll" from the terrorist attacks. The middle- and upper-class enclaves of Middletown are populated by families whose breadwinners work on Wall Street. Sheehy spent more than two years interviewing more than 50 residents to learn how their lives were changed forever. Almost immediately, considerations of "the great green salve" of money intruded, pitting grieving families against corporate interests and prompting criticism of the families as money-grubbers. Sheehy also chronicles the social and psychological changes in an affluent, highly individualistic, not particularly friendly community, where some 9/11 widows progressed from stay-at-home soccer moms to aggressive advocates for investigation into the government's foreknowledge and reaction to the attacks. Sheehy looks beyond the heroic images of the families to show their struggles with issues as huge as faith and as mundane as yard work. She also explores the long and arduous process of recovery for families learning to live with the "new normal" of almost constant fear and anxiety. An incredible close-up look.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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