Falling Man: A Novel by Don DeLillo
Large Photo	Edition: Paperback Publication Date: June 03, 2008 Publisher: Scribner ISBN: 1416546065 Amazon.com Sales Rank: 10987 Average Customer Rating: List price: $14.00	Save 47% off list price Price Range: $7.46 - $14.00

		9 Merchants
Compare Prices

Merchant			Base		S & H		Price
Alibris			$7.46	+	$3.49	=	$10.95
Textbookx.com			$9.55	+	$3.58	=	$13.13
BookByte.com			$10.50	+	$3.45	=	$13.95
Strand Books			$10.50	+	$3.50	=	$14.00
Amazon			$11.20	+	$3.99	=	$15.19
Barnes & Noble			$12.60	+	$3.99	=	$16.59
Blackwells			$14.00	+	$4.48	=	$18.48
Powells			see site	+	$3.50	=	see site
eCampus			see site	+	$2.98	=	see site

Description

Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, heartbreaking.

From Amazon.com Review:
  The defining moment of turn-of-the-21st-century America is perfectly portrayed in National Book Award winner Don DeLillo's Falling Man. The book takes its title from the electrifying photograph of the man who jumped or fell from the North Tower on 9/11. It also refers to a performance artist who recreates the picture. The artist straps himself into a harness and in high visibility areas jumps from an elevated structure, such as a railway overpass or a balcony, startling passersby as he hangs in the horrifying pose of the falling man.

Keith Neudecker, a lawyer and survivor of the attack, arrives on his estranged wife Lianne's doorstep, covered with soot and blood, carrying someone else's briefcase. In the days and weeks that follow, moments of connection alternate with complete withdrawl from his wife and young son, Justin. He begins a desultory affair with the owner of the briefcase based only on their shared experience of surviving: "the timeless drift of the long spiral down." Justin uses his binoculars to scan the skies with his friends, looking for "Bill Lawton" (a misunderstood version of bin Laden) and more killing planes. Lianne suddenly sees Islam everywhere: in a postcard from a friend, in a neighbor's music--and is frightened and angered by its ubiquity. She is riveted by the Falling Man. Her mother Nina's response is to break up with her long-time German lover over his ancient politics. In short, the old ways and days are gone forever; a new reality has taken over everyone's consciousness. This new way is being tried on, and it doesn't fit. Keith and Lianne weave into reconciliation. Keith becomes a professional poker player and, when questioned by Lianne about the future of this enterprise, he thinks: "There was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not."

DeLillo also tells the story of Hammad, one of the young men in flight training on the Gulf Coast, who says: "We are willing to die, they are not. This is our srength, to love death, to feel the claim of armed martyrdom." He also asks: "But does a man have to kill himself in order to accomplish something in the world?" His answer is that he is one of the hijackers on the plane that strikes the North Tower.

At the end of the book, De Lillo takes the reader into the Tower as the plane strikes the building. Through all the terror, fire and smoke, De Lillo's voice is steady as a metronome, recounting exactly what happens to Keith as he sees friends and co-workers maimed and dead, navigates the stairs and, ultimately, is saved. Though several post-9/11 novels have been written, not one of them is as compellingly true, faultlessly conceived, and beautifully written as Don De Lillo's Falling Man. --Valerie Ryan

Reviews

Disappointing execution of an important story -	Falling Man: A Novel Review
The author's description of the events of 9/11 are quite good and put you in the buildings and the horror of the area around the WTC during and after the attack. The story he wraps around it is halting and discombobulated (for lack of a better word). He makes no attempt to emotionally connect you with his main characters. In fact you grow to dislike the hero increasingly. Had he spent more time with the tragic character "The Falling Man" and that of the wife, the author might have had something. DeLillo's writing style is frustrating and dulling.
After The Planes -	Falling Man: A Novel Review
I couldn't pick this up when it first came out. I listened to it recently on CD during a long drive and with each mile, I felt the growing weight and gravity, lived with the men and women grappling with the aftermath, after the planes. There is a phrase in "Falling Man" that covers lots of ground about what this book is about: "beyond the limits of safe understanding." I think that's what DeLillo challenged himself to do, to understand beyond where we normally search for comprehension about our world. The tone here is dispassionate, almost like a list of details. I heard echoes of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," that same gripping weight. The word "ash" comes back over and over and that's what we were all coated with, the emotional ash, the "organic shrapnel" that might not at first be visible, that might take its toll slowly, over time. The mattress scene in "Falling Man" is a brilliant, along with the recurring performance artist, the gambling and the odd emotional connections forged and forced by the devastation of the attack. "Falling Man" starts shortly after the attack and ends up just before the attack, a haunting choice, taking us back to the beginning, to try and imagine how "God's name" could be on the "tongues of killers." Read "Falling Man" when you want to try and push the limits of your own understanding and/or you don't want to forget, for whatever reason.
Don't know if this qualifies as a 'review'. -	Falling Man: A Novel Review
As every one else in the US, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing on 9/11. I turned numb, I recorded every broadcast for weeks afterwards. I've seen the photo of the falling man. A friend of mine was on the first plane. To this day I am tormented by thoughts of what he may have felt, feared, or experienced once he realized things went south. I started to read this book and made a lot of progress, but it became more difficult. Finally I could not control my emotions, my nights became an endless film loop of my recordings. I had to stop reading the book so that I can retain some semblance of control and acceptance. It was more than a novel to me.
DeLillo's sad concession to a career obsession -	Falling Man: A Novel Review
Is this great writing?: unassuming prose about earth-shattering events? Is this what Harold Bloom means by "canonical strangeness?" I am a recent convert to DeLillo: I picked up Cosmopolis some time back & couldn't get thru page 2. Then I found Underworld in the local library, about a year ago: the prologue was this unassuming prose about an iconic event; an American event: Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard `Round the World; refashioned here from the POV of FBI Dir. J. Edgar Hoover, Giants' announcer Russ Hodges, & a fictional gate crasher named Cotter Martin. Postmodernism as middle class value. Underworld was published in 1997, but I cite that only to note DeLillo's periodic obsession with...the Twin Towers. When character Brian Glassic climbs up on a hillock @New Jersey's Fresh Kills landfill & ponders a metaphysical connection between that & the Towers...well, chills up the spine doesn't quite capture the feeling. Now, in Falling Man, the death of the Towers (yet, DeLillo's too smart or too trusting of the reader to remind him that much rubble from the Towers was trucked to Fresh Kills) is the centerpiece: North Tower survivor Keith Neudecker wanders stunned & drifting, back into the lives of estranged wife Lianne & son Justin. Then he wanders back out again: such is life in the days & years after. Meanwhile, Lianne wants her writers' workshop of incipient Alzheimer's sufferers to tell how 9-11 affected them; Keith returns the briefcase he somehow acquired during the long trek down the stairwell to its owner ("Your heritage. Your cell phone"), with whom he has an intense yet transient affair; Justin pilfers a pair of binoculars & he & a coupla friends scan the skies for more of "Bill Lawton" (an errant understanding of "bin Laden")'s planes. Thruout the city, an anonymous man in a blue suit, white shirt, & harness throws himself off high platforms to dangle 20 feet above the fray in the pose from the famous photo. In the end, the years after play out like the days after: Keith will wander in & out of the lives of his wife & "kid"; the stunned & aching silences the only bridge betw. the ash & smoke & the nothing like anything in this world.
disappointing -	Falling Man: A Novel Review
I've never read DeLillo and don't know if I will again. I thought the beginning was great and the ending was good but the body of the book was rambling. I understand what the author was trying to do, but I think the disjointedness of the middle was either overdone or poorly done.
See more customer reviews...