Yay!!!!! I’m doing a reading tonight in Kensington if you want to come -lofty pigeon 630 - would love to see u!!

thanks!!!!

6/ "These people…are not meant to serve as a representative sample of Americans…this group becomes a particle collider for the forces of the age. Reitman is writing an intimate history of post-9/11 America. Her subjects are the vessel; emotions are the thing."

5/ "What she extracts from her braided portraits of ordinary Americans…is a slow but steady drift in the national character…toward increasing suspicion, contempt, dehumanization, paranoia, conspiracy and nihilism. Thus emerges an origin story for the present."

4/ A few of my favorite lines: "Janet Reitman's richly empathetic, morally complex, many-windowed new book…is not a book about Sept. 11. It's a book about how America reacted to it…and how that reaction changed us."

3/ So it's immensely powerful to read an assessment of your work by someone who clearly understands what you were trying to do. (And Anand's latest, Man in the Mirror, is astonishing. If you haven't read it, buy it right now.)

2/ I spent eight years writing (and rewriting) this book, trying to reflect the tumult of post-9/11 America and the many tiny, psychic fractures that created our present. It's never been easy to sum up in a one-line pitch, because it's about so many things, most of all people.

Thank you!!! And thank you, Bernard xoxoxo

The clearest and most succinct expression I've read of how, beyond the clear fascist rhetoric, the Prairieland prosecutions have terrifyingly expanded federal legal power, beyond the point many feds even wanted to go.