The inside story behind the three shaping events of the author's life--and times.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial aircraft and crashed two of them into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. After learning about the other attacks, passengers on the fourth hijacked plane, Flight 93, fought back, and the plane was crashed into an empty field in western Pennsylvania about 20 minutes by air from Washington, D.C. The Twin Towers ultimately collapsed, due to the damage from the impacts and subsequent fires. Nearly 3,000 people were killed from 93 different countries. It was the worst attack on American soil since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. A detailed account of these events—plus the history that led up to them, and America's response—can be found in 9/11: The Attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11 is a ground-breaking collection of essays by some of the foremost scholars writing in the field of contemporary American film. Through a dynamic critical analysis of the defining films of the turbulent post-9/11 decade, the volume explores and interrogates the impact of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' on American cinema and culture. In a vibrant discussion of films like American Sniper (2014), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Spectre (2015), The Hateful Eight (2015), Lincoln (2012), The Mist (2007), Children of Men (2006), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), noted authors Geoff King, Guy Westwell, John Shelton Lawrence, Ian Scott, Andrew Schopp, James Kendrick, Sean Redmond, Steffen Hantke and many others consider the power of popular film to function as a potent cultural artefact, able to both reflect the defining fears and anxieties of the tumultuous era, but also shape them in compelling and resonant ways.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001, have forever changed the lives of the individuals and families that were directly affected and have changed history for everyone. Those same events were the beginning of a 24-hour-per-day, 7-day-per-week effort by structural engineers to investigate the condition of the buildings remaining at the World Trade Center site, to work with the rescue and clean-up crews in evaluating the safety of the towering piles of rubble, and to try to explain what happened to the buildings as they collapsed. After 9-11 describes one engineer's experiences on site and off as part of that effort.

Unlike other accounts of the historic attacks on 9/11, this discussion surveys the role of the world’s most advanced military command and control plane, the E-4B, in the day’s events and proposes that the horrific incidents were the work of a covert operation staged within elements of the U.S. military and the intelligence community. Presenting hard evidence in the form of proprietary photos taken from raw footage filmed by CNN, the account places the world’s most advanced electronics platform circling over the White House at approximately the time of the Pentagon attack. The argument offers an analysis of the new evidence within the context of the events and shows that it is irreconcilable with the official 9/11 narrative.