I was eleven years old when I heard that a plane hit the World Trade Center. I was on the bus on the way to school awaiting the morning news jingle on the radio. My friend and I sang it every day, followed by our own news broadcast featuring commercials of our made-up businesses and declarations of how unjustly long our bus ride was.
That day a reporter cut the jingle short to announce, “a plane hit the World Trade Center!” I had no idea what the World Trade Center was and was annoyed that they’d cut the jingle. Why should I care what’s going on in New York? Who was dumb enough to fly a plane into a building?
My class spent a portion of the day watching the news. I recognized a real tragedy had occurred that had all the teachers upset, and there seemed to be an unspoken rule among the students that we’d cut the antics for the day. As the days, months, and years passed, I learned about the Pentagon, where to find Afghanistan and Iraq on a map, and that wars existed outside my textbooks.
The Only Plane in the Sky broadened my perspective of that tragic day and the days to come. The book is an “oral history,” written as a flowing conversation involving those who worked in the World Trade Center, emergency personal, firefighters, reporters, senators, teachers, students, those working closely with President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, family and friends frantically trying to reach their loved ones, and more.
Each paragraph features a different person, and the following paragraph picks up where the previous person left off, presenting multiple perspectives of the same event. The result is a gripping, fast-paced, and often disturbing snapshot of humanity in crisis.
The suspense of this book comes not from learning what will happen but in experiencing the details of the human experience in what feels like real time. I found that the details that impacted me the most were often the smallest and least consequential. One reporter shared that after hearing of the first plane strike, he took a shower before heading to the World Trade Center site. By the time he got there, the site was covered in a foot of dusty glass and debris, making his shower pointless. A New York Police Department inspector noted the number of women’s heels in the streets that were abandoned as people fled the area.
The faithful will be pleased to see several instances of the Catholic Church amidst the chaos, including the heroics of New York Fire Department chaplain Father Mychal Judge, citizens who credit Jesus for giving them courage, and a first responder who feared a priest would scold him for washing his face with holy water. It’s encouraging to see that where there’s tragedy and confusion, Jesus is there in the midst.
As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I highly recommend this book for everyone and especially to those who were too young to understand the events as they unfolded that day.