Perhaps no book about 9/11 will spend less time recounting the events, strictly speaking, of 9/11 than Homeland. The odds are that you know that story already. If not, plenty of books exist to recount the minute details of who did what, when. Beck instead covers the day itself by reliving the singular experience of the television news coverage through which we almost universally experienced it (9/11 was in fact the final event we experienced collectively through media since supplanted or upended by the internet). Two decades is a long time in our fickle memories, and “What happened?” is now an easier question to answer than “How did we react?” or “How did it feel?”
Familiar names and phrases appear—Osama bin Laden, Flight 93, Rudy Giuliani, George W. Bush—but Beck succeeds more in recreating a sensory experience than a timeline of events. I already knew which planes struck which targets and when; Beck’s use of transcripts and video from television coverage of the day, highlighting the confusion, the emotions, and the disbelief of the on-air personalities, recreates the experience of seeing it happen in real time. I was 22 years old on 9/11 and thought that my memories of the day were clear and reliable. But Beck recounts news anchors on the evening of the attacks reacting in speculation-heavy confusion as explosions rocked Kabul—explosions that turned out to have nothing to do with the United States or the terror attacks that morning. Despite having watched it all live—and feeling confident that I remembered it accurately—I was stunned to read this detail. I had, and have, no recollection of it at all. This kind of memory-jog is a regular experience throughout the book, and worth the price of admission.
Homeland covers an enormous amount of intellectual and narrative ground, and any book so ambitious risks becoming unwieldy. Beck effectively organizes it, though, around four intertwined crises either created or exacerbated by 9/11. First, and for my money most engrossingly, he examines the rising tide of militarism in American life. While this is most obvious in foreign policy, it is more pervasive (and interesting) in the quotidian aspects of American life. Our entertainment, our interaction with public space (think of how we attend a sporting event or use an airport now compared to, say, in 1996), our consumption habits, and our cultural affectations (such as the lionization of the first responder, a dynamic that has abetted the staggering growth of the power of domestic law enforcement in our lives and our politics) all bear the imprint of the humiliation, anger, and trauma that 9/11 provoked.