The Terror Dream

Resumen del libro

In this most original examination of America's post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country's psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore traditional manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did we react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fueled by hatred of Western emancipation lead us to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling security moms, swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the rescue of a female soldier cast as a helpless little girl ?

The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults by nonwhite barbarians on town and village. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms.

Biografía del autor

Susan Faludi (Nueva York, 1959) es periodista, licenciada por la Universidad de Harvard. Ha colaborado con The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation y The Wall Street Journal, entre otros. En 1991 recibió el Premio Pulitzer y, desde entonces, ha escrito diferentes libros que abordan cuestiones vinculadas al feminismo Su último libro fue En el cuarto oscuro (2016).