Narrator: On October 28, 1886, the dedication of the Statue of Liberty sparked a spontaneous celebration in Lower Manhattan. As office workers watched the festivities, one inspired boy tossed ticker tape from a high window, and soon, a blizzard of paper rained down, creating a new tradition: the ticker-tape parade, a symbol of pure joy and triumph. One hundred and fifteen years later, another cascade of paper fell over the same streets, but this was no celebration. As the Twin Towers burned, a storm of office memos, personal letters, and business reports fluttered down, each piece a fragment of a life suddenly interrupted or extinguished. This haunting contrast between a symbol of celebration and a symbol of devastation lies at the heart of the day that changed everything. In his exhaustive and deeply human account, FALL AND RISE: The Story of 9/11, author Mitchell Zuckoff reconstructs the events of September 11, 2001, not as a distant historical event, but through the eyes of the people who lived it, moment by agonizing moment.

Narrator: The story of 9/11 does not begin on that clear Tuesday morning, but years earlier. In February 1998, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa, a "clear declaration of war" against the United States, calling on Muslims to kill Americans—civilians and military alike—wherever they could be found. While U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of bin Laden, they failed to grasp the full scale of his ambition. The public, meanwhile, remained largely oblivious. A Gallup poll on September 10, 2001, found that less than one percent of Americans considered terrorism the nation's top concern.

This sense of normalcy is powerfully illustrated in the final, ordinary hours of those whose lives were about to intersect with history. On his 130-acre farm in Massachusetts, American Airlines pilot John Ogonowski spent the evening of September 10th helping his daughter with her math homework. He loved his farm so much that he tried, and failed, to get out of his scheduled flight the next morning: American 11. In Washington D.C., conservative commentator Barbara Olson decided to take a later flight—American 77—so she could have breakfast with her husband, Ted, on his birthday. And in a crash pad near Newark airport, United flight attendant CeeCee Lyles, a former police officer who had found new happiness in her career, fell asleep clutching a teddy bear, looking forward to an easy day. These quiet, domestic moments stand in stark contrast to the meticulous, final preparations of the hijackers, like Mohamed Atta, who was methodically moving into position for an attack that America would never see coming.

Narrator: The hijackers were able to succeed not just through planning, but by exploiting a security system built to fight the last war. In 2001, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was primarily concerned with preventing sabotage, specifically bombs in checked luggage. This assumption shaped the entire security apparatus. The Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS) was designed to flag passengers who checked bags, not those who carried weapons on board. Consequently, the very items the 9/11 hijackers used—knives and box cutters with blades under four inches—were explicitly permitted in carry-on luggage.

This critical misjudgment was compounded by systemic weaknesses. Airport screeners were often low-paid and poorly trained, incentivized to keep lines moving quickly rather than perform thorough searches. On the morning of 9/11, several hijackers were flagged by the CAPPS system, but their carry-on bags received only a cursory look. Others set off metal detectors but were still waved through. The system was looking for bombs, not blades. Furthermore, the protocol for hijackings was based on decades-old scenarios where hijackers made demands for money or political asylum. Pilots and controllers were trained to cooperate and negotiate. The idea that a hijacker’s goal was not to land the plane but to use it as a guided missile was, as one study noted, simply not "in the game plan."

Narrator: At 8:14 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 went silent. On the ground, Boston air traffic controller Peter Zalewski tried repeatedly to make contact, but there was no reply. Then, a voice with a Middle Eastern accent broke through the static: "We have some planes. Just stay quiet, and you'll be okay." The use of the plural, "planes," was a chilling, overlooked clue. The hijacking had begun.

Inside the aircraft, chaos erupted. The hijackers used mace and stabbed at least two flight attendants and a passenger. Yet amid the terror, two flight attendants, Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney, began a desperate effort to communicate with the ground. Using an Airfone, Betty Ong calmly relayed critical details to an American Airlines reservation center for over twenty minutes. She reported the stabbings, the hijackers' seat numbers, and the fact that the crew couldn't get into the cockpit. Simultaneously, Amy Sweeney was on the phone with a flight services manager, her voice trembling as she described the scene. "Something is wrong," she said. "We are in a rapid descent... We are flying low. We are flying very, very low." Her final words were a gasp: "Oh my God! We are way too low!" At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Narrator: As the world watched the North Tower burn, believing it to be a terrible accident, United Airlines Flight 175 was already under the control of a second team of hijackers. At 9:03 a.m., it was flown directly into the South Tower on live television, leaving no doubt that America was under attack. On the ground, the response was a whirlwind of confusion. At the FAA's command center, it was Ben Sliney's first day as National Operations Manager. Realizing the unprecedented nature of the crisis, he made the historic decision to issue a nationwide ground stop, ordering every one of the 4,000-plus commercial and private planes in the sky to land at the nearest airport.

Meanwhile, a third hijacked plane, American Flight 77, had disappeared from radar over Ohio. Controllers, assuming a crash, had been looking for it in the wrong place. For 36 agonizing minutes, it flew undetected back toward Washington D.C. From the plane, passenger Barbara Olson managed to call her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, twice. "Our plane has been hijacked," she told him, her voice calm but urgent. She relayed that the hijackers had knives and had forced everyone to the back of the plane. At 9:37 a.m., the C-130 cargo plane flying nearby reported the unthinkable: the jet had crashed directly into the Pentagon.

Narrator: The fourth hijacked plane, United Flight 93, had been delayed on the tarmac in Newark for over 40 minutes. This delay proved to be the most critical factor of the day. By the time the hijackers made their move, the passengers and crew, through a series of courageous phone calls to loved ones, knew what was happening in New York and Washington. They knew this was not a normal hijacking; it was a suicide mission.

Passenger Tom Burnett called his wife, Deena, four times. "I know we're all going to die," he told her. "There's three of us who are going to do something about it." Jeremy Glick told his wife, Lyz, that the passengers had taken a vote. Flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw was on the phone with her husband, reporting that they were boiling water to use as a weapon. And passenger Todd Beamer, after reciting the Lord's Prayer with an Airfone operator, was overheard saying to the others, "Are you guys ready? Okay. Let's roll." The cockpit voice recorder captured the sounds of the revolt—shouts, crashes, and the hijackers' panicked prayers. Realizing they would not reach their target, believed to be the U.S. Capitol, the hijacker pilot, Ziad Jarrah, rolled the plane and plunged it into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. They were the only ones on that terrible day who fought back in the air, sacrificing themselves to prevent an even greater catastrophe.

Narrator: FALL AND RISE is a monumental work of narrative nonfiction that accomplishes a difficult task: it makes the incomprehensible horror of 9/11 deeply personal. The book’s most important takeaway is that this historic event was not just about falling towers and geopolitical shifts; it was the sum of thousands of individual stories of love, loss, duty, and unimaginable bravery. By focusing on the people—the pilot who wanted to be on his farm, the little girl on her first flight, the flight attendants who became the first responders in the sky—Zuckoff reminds us of the profound human cost of hatred.

The book begins with an epigraph about forest fires, noting that the scars left on a tree can be read for generations, telling the story of the fire's intensity and the year it occurred. The same is true of September 11th. The scars on the nation and on countless families are still there, hidden just beneath the surface. The challenge left by this powerful book is to never stop reading those scars, to remember the names and the stories, and to ensure that the lessons of that day are never forgotten.