In an extensive article, Carlos Lozada, nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post and the author of What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, looks back over 20 years of books relating to 9/11. In summation, he writes:
In The Forever War, Dexter Filkins describes a nation in which “something had broken fundamentally after so many years of war .?.?. there had been some kind of primal dislocation between cause and effect, a numbness wholly understandable, necessary even, given the pain.” He was writing of Afghanistan, but his words could double as an interpretation of the United States over the past two decades. Still reeling from an attack that dropped out of a blue sky, America is suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress democracy. It remains in recovery, still a good country, even if a broken good country.
