Review: The Only Plane in the Sky

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, by Garrett M. Graff (Avid Reader Press, 2019)

First line: “Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001.”

Well, that’s true. It was 8th grade picture day. My dad and I were watching the Today Show during breakfast, like always. We watched as the second plane hit, and then he took me to school. The hum in the hallways and lunchroom and classes was constant. I recently found some old folded up notes passed on that day between my best friends, providing a 13-year-old Midwesterner analysis that this was, “just like Pearl Harbor, but so much worse for the following reasons…”

That’s pretty much where my brain goes when I think of September 11th. My bowl of soggy cereal, and my Spanish teacher who let us listen to the radio even though the administration didn’t want us to. Since then, I’ve read several fictional books about 9/11, some great ones like All We Have Left, by Wendy Mills, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, or Nine, Ten, by Nora Raleigh Baskin). But I’ve never really exposed myself to informational accounts of the day. I didn’t see any of the many documentaries or movies that came out either. It was just one of those things that I figured I remembered, so why look at all the awful details?

But then I saw and heard so many glowing reviews of Graff’s book, that I decided it was time to let myself look back. And boy, it was worse than I thought.

The first 390 pages of Graff’s book recount the entire day of September 11, 2001, from start to finish, told in the voices of those who experienced it. The epilogue, the last 30ish pages, cover the days, weeks, and years following the event. But for those 390 pages, it’s non-stop. We hear from the airline employees who took the terrorist’s tickets at the gate, the survivors that climbed down countless flights of stairs, only to be trapped in the rubble of the collapse, the firefighters and rescue workers just doing their jobs, the spouses of passengers on Flights 77, 93, 11, and 175, the Presidential photographer on Air Force One, and hundreds of others. I read the first 75 pages or so in one sitting, and was simply horrified. Like I mentioned above, being a teenage Midwesterner with no personal connections to the events of the day, I have very surface-level memories. And the accounts given in these pages are anything but surface-level. It’s brutal, graphic, and extremely upsetting. Let’s just say I had to switch to a rom-com book before bed each night.

I think most of us who didn’t have such a close experience of 9/11 forget what that day means to our country. I’m not a particularly patriotic person, and still, the American experience of this day is breathtaking. I don’t know how else to describe this book, other than to say, its effect is exceedingly powerful. Like others have said, I think it should be required reading for every American.

So go ahead and get yours hands on this one if you haven’t already. Set aside some time, maybe outside on a day in which the sky is “deep blue… cerulean blue… the bluest of blues… a 9/11 sky”, and soak it all in.

2020 Challenge update: I’m crossing off “More Than 400 Pages” for this one.