Published: 2 March 2009
ISBN: 9780099488699
Imprint: Vintage
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
RRP: $24.99

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Non-fiction prose

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The Second Plane

September 11, 2001-2007

Martin Amis

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

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.'

Published: 2 March 2009
ISBN: 9780099488699
Imprint: Vintage
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
RRP: $24.99

Categories:

Non-fiction prose

Share…

About the author

Martin Amis

Martin Amis is the author of fourteen novels, two collections of stories and eight works of non-fiction. His novel Time’s Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for which his subsequent novel Yellow Dog was also longlisted, and his memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. He lives in New York.

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Praise for The Second Plane

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