Download After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era AudioBook Free
The storyplot commences on September 12, 2001. It reads just like a novel. However the characters in award-winning journalist Steven Brill's America are real. They don't really have all the answers or all the virtues of fictional heroes.
For the reason that they may be so human -- so much like the rest folks -- which makes the way they rise to the task of September 12 such an inspiring story about how exactly America really works.
A Customs inspector somehow must guard against a nuclear bomb that could be hidden in another of the thousands of cargo containers from worldwide sitting on his dock in NY harbor.
A woman in New Jersey, suddenly widowed with three young children, doesn't know getting the keys to her husband's car, significantly less how she can challenge the head of the federal victims' fund.
An entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, who makes machines that screen luggage for bombs, can't decide if this crisis is an opportunity he should seize.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has no idea where to find the new, hidden enemy living in our midst.
The young, just-hired director of the American Civil Liberties Union wonders how he can keep Ashcroft from going too much.
The CEO of a giant insurer must decide whether to risk economical panic by not paying damage claims that he could legally be able to avoid.
Red Cross President Bernadine Healy must work out how to collect and allocate donations while dodging a hostile board of directors.
Career civil servant Gale Rossides must recruit and train the most significant workforce ever hired by the federal government -- the new airport passenger screeners.
A proprietor of the shoe repair shop -- helped by two young women, pro bono legal representatives -- must rebuild an enterprise buried in the rubble of Ground Zero.
A Detroit Border Patrol agent -- whose bosses want to fire him for speaking out about how exactly unprotected his stretch of border is -- must choose whether to risk his family's livelihood by sounding the alarm.
Tom Ridge must run through a bureaucratic wall to mount a true homeland security defense.
Drawing on 347 on-the-record interviews and revelations from memos of government meetings, court filings, and other documents, Brill gives us a front-row seat as these and other players in this real-life drama cross paths in a series of alliances and confrontations and fight for their own interests and their version of the public interest.
The result is a gritty story -- and trailblazing journalism -- that inspires us not because these Americans or their country are perfect, but because they were tough enough, anchored enough, and living in something that encouraged and enabled these to meet the awesome challenges they faced.
