Until the Fires Stopped Burning

"This is the only work on 9/11 that describes people's experience in depth, and at the same time provides us with a broad sense of the human impact of the whole event."-Robert Lifton, Author of many books, including Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima and Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir.

"Strozier has crafted a unique and powerful blend of shattering personal narratives and thoughtful analysis. Anyone who wonders what 9/11 was like for those who experienced it up close will find Strozier's work the necessary reference. No other author possesses Strozier's blend of psychological insight, cultural and historical perspective, and narrative fluency. The intimately personal and the profoundly historical mingle here to produce a profound understanding of the human and cultural impact of that day when America changed forever."-James W. Jones, Author of Blood That Cries Out from the Earth: The Psychology of Religious Terrorism

"This book offers a way of understanding-of taking the measure of, coming to terms with-a thing that probably does not lend itself to any other kind of telling. That's why it is special. It issues from a richly layered mind."-Kai Erikson, Chair of American Studies at Yale University, editor of the Yale Review, and author of A New Species of Trouble

"Charles B. Strozier has given us a whole, complex view of 9/11 in a way no other book has. In Until The Fires Stopped Burning, Strozier blends historical, clinical, cultural, and personal perspectives in order to conceptualize how and why 9/11 changed American history. It's a book that every American should read."-Peter Balakian, Author of Black Dog of Fate

"The atrocity of 9/11 did not burn and bury so many as the Holocaust, nor hit with the massive force of Hiroshima's black rain and wind, but Until the Fires Stopped Burning shows how these two earlier horrors took part that day to produce a psychological and political tsunami that shook America to its core and continues to change the world. In the spirit of John Hersey's Hiroshima and Elie Weisel's Night, but with the rigor of a scientist, historian and psychotherapist Charles B. Strozier tells a gripping and honest tale through stories told to him by the seared victims of New York City. These mostly ordinary people, who happened upon an extraordinary event, did not encounter ordinary, plain death that splendid late summer morning. They saw instead an apocalyptic landscape of vast, collective suffering closer to the end of the world. "This is what hell looks like," said one, "in case you ever stopped to wonder." Yet this is also a heartening apologue of healing and recovery among the fellowship of New Yorkers. Saddened and in despair about the world and its capacity for violence, they gather up from the abyss that "hope without which there cannot be life." How different and far is this powerful book from the fear mongering of the terror industry, and the mass of hysterical punditry and politicking that feeds into it."-Scott Atran, Anthropologist and Psychologist, Author of Talking to the Enemy

"Strozier's book not only captures the experience of 9/11 as it unfolded that day for responders like myself who survived, but the book also captures the psychological experience of those for whom every day since has been 9/11-like in its power over their lives"-Tom Ryan, FDNY (RET)