The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

by Martin Amis
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One of Britain’s finest writers confronts the ‘defining moment’ of the 21st century.

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Synopsis

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11 a week later in a piece for The Guardian beginning, ‘It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment.’ And he has kept returning to September 11, in essays and reviews, and in two remarkable short stories, 'In the Palce of the End' and 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta'. All are collected here, together with an expanded account of his travels with Tony Blair in 2007 - to Belfast, to Washington, and to Baghdad and Basra.'We are arriving at an axiom in long-term thinking about international terrorism,' he writes: 'the real danger lies, not in what it inflicts, but in what it provokes. Thus by far the gravest consequence of September 11, to date, is Iraq ... Meanwhile, September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism.'

Editorial Reviews

"What Amis has really done, as the chronologically ordered pieces in this collection demonstrate was to go on a political journey....possibly the most fully engaged writer of our age" - David Aaronovitch, The Times

"Certainly witty, clever and polished" - William Dalrymple, Sunday Times

"Trenchant, deeply informed and informative" - Independent on Sunday

"It is to Martin Amis's great credit that he has, from the start, risked the condemnation of the fashionable left by speaking out against what he calls the 'racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist and genocidal world' of the Islamic terrorist." - Mail on Sunday

"As well as being a series of dispatches from the international and political front line, it is also a book about what it means to be a writer, here in the foothills of the twenty-first century, with all the compromises, collusions and professional embarrassments this entails" - D.J. Taylor, Literary Review

"A handy bedside companion ... Amis is an Englishman who understands America, a sympathetic critic if you like. Today, he belongs to a distinguished minority and deserves to be read as such" - Financial Times

"A gleaming marriage of full-throttle stylistics and penetrating thought, The Second Plane is a smart and
indecently entertaining analysis of the world we woke up to on September 12, 2001." - Sunday Herald

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