I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks, by Laurie Garrett. 2011. Kindle
Reviewed by Maia Szalavitz
Laurie Garrett is the only reporter to win the three major prizes for journalism: the Pulitzer, the Peabody and the Polk (she won that one twice).
Her first book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance was a New York Times bestseller. Her follow up, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, also brought the threat of infectious disease into sharp focus (disclosure: I am acknowledged in it for help on addiction information related to IV drug use). Her work on AIDS and Ebola (for which she won the Pulitzer) is stellar, and she is an essential writer and thinker on public health.
Her latest, I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks, was published as an ebook on the 10th anniversary of those events. Like her prior work, it is relentlessly and thoroughly reported, profoundly important and often compelling. Any historian of 9/11 focused on public health will have to reckon with this work.
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