The Eleventh Day: a scholarly but engaging 9/11 history

The gripping story of the bumbling actions and inactions of the FBI, the CIA and the Bush administration in the run-up to and following September 11, 2001.

The Notes and Sources appendix in The Eleventh Day is 126 pages long. The nine-page Selected Bibliography lists nearly 250 books but does not include newspapers, magazines and other books that were used for general reference and background. Documents declassified by the US 9/11 Commission in the past two years number some 300,000 pages. The 9/11 chronology the husband-wife author team put together during their four years of research exceeded 1,000 pages, they say.

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This is an exhaustive work - and wholly believable for the objective reader, given the extent of the research and documentation. Best of all, even with all that gravitas, it is a wonderful, engaging narrative.

Spellbound, one learns who the 9/11 hijackers and many of their victims were; why the "truthers" - those who believe the US either let it happen on purpose or made it happen on purpose - do not have a leg to stand on; the astonishing extent of the bumbling actions and inactions of the FBI, the CIA and the Bush administration; and the support the terrorists received from powerful figures in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

It tells this gripping story in full.

Updated: September 09, 2011, 12:00 AM