It turns out the federally funded US Commission for International Religious Freedom is packed with people leading the fight against the Cordoba House project near Ground Zero.
Following up on the weekend’s discussion of books on the 9/11 attacks and why there seem to be so relatively few detailed and non-agenda-driven narrative histories of them, we heard from the author of one of the books that did get recommended: Terry McDermott, author of Perfect Soldiers. Here’s his take …
Regarding 9/11 books: I think the lack of books specifically about the event can be explained by one overwhelming fact: the reporting was damned near impossible. That is why the vast majority of the 1,000’s of books related to 9/11 are polemics of one kind or another.
It’s hard to look at these numbers for the congressional generic ballot and think anything but that the GOP is moving into a break out phase heading into November …
Click the TPM icon for full-sized graph.
Late Update: TPM Reader VF notes that some of this ‘break out’ may simply be that we’re now in the window of time before the election in which many pollsters are moving from ‘registered voters’ to ‘likely voters’, a screen that is much more likely to pick up the enthusiasm gap. So it’s probably true that at least some of the change is simply an artifact of the changeover in polling methodology, rather than a true trend. Having said that, that doesn’t make the picture any prettier for Democrats. It would just suggest that we’re only now getting a true picture of the spot they’re in.
Karen Hughes, top Bush administration official and chief of outreach to the world’s Muslims, says she opposes the Cordoba House project, but doesn’t mention she thought enough of the Imam at the center of the controversy, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, to send him abroad as a spokesman for moderate Islam in America.
Florida holds its primaries tomorrow. Evan McMorris-Santoro has the latest state of play in the Democratic race for U.S. Senate and the Republican race for governor. Interestingly, the big-spending gazillionaires in each race looked ready to run away with the party nominations a month ago, but the polling has shifted pretty dramatically and it’s not clear that those personal fortunes are necessarily going to be enough to get it done.
Tom Tancredo has been a tea partier since way before tea partying was even cool. So why are the tea party legions in Colorado so put out with Tancredo now? It might have something to do with the fact that Tancredo urged tea party leaders to work within the Republican Party then turned around and entered the governor’s race as a third party candidate, dashing the general election hopes of the GOP nominee, the tea party friendly Dan Maes.
A very interesting article in the Post about the paucity of Muslim chaplains serving Virginia’s growing Muslim prison population.
Yesterday I asked you to recommend the best book on the 9/11 attacks, looking for works of serious narrative non-fiction, as free of polemical approach as is possible in such things. And I must say the results were fascinating on several levels. First, thanks to everyone who has written in. We got a lot of responses. And I was only able to respond to a few. But I read every one. And your time and effort are really appreciated.
What struck me most is how few books were recommended. The vast majority, really the overwhelming majority of you, recommended one of two books, and one of these might not even meet some people’s definition of a book. The two were Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower and the 9/11 Commission Report. Read More
I have a favor to ask. I’m looking for a good history of the 9/11 attacks. What’s the best one around?
I ask because I was just online and had to look up a detail about the attacks. So I went to the Wikipedia page on the attacks. And as they often are, you have this big, systematic, fairly dispassionate account with just a mass of details. And even though I remember the attacks, did a fair amount of reporting on them in the days, months and years after and have been, in various ways, writing and thinking about them for years, I realized that enough time has now gone by (about 9 years) that it’s becoming recognizable to me as history. And I wanted to read it all together again, as history.
Now, there are a slew of books on the attacks. Plenty of the ‘radical Islam is going to kill us all’ variety; and others of the ‘it’s all George Bush’s fault’ variety. Then there are first person accounts, tell-alls. But none of those are what I’m interested in. I’m looking for a good factually-grounded narrative history of the attacks, their background, execution and probably something on the aftermath as well. As much as is possible in these matters I’m not looking for one with an overly strong thesis, especially not a political one. I’m looking for a good narrative description of what happened.
I’ve probably seen a dozen of these books come across my desk as review copies or at book stores or in reviews over the years. But I can’t recall a lot of specific ones now and I never new which were the best. So, again, a favor. Which should I pick up?