One of the selections in Glory: A Nation's Spirit Defeats the Attack on America is an essay by Sarah Sills of Brooklyn titled "Let me DO SOMETHING," in which she tells of her need—and that of countless other volunteers—to somehow contribute to the rescue and rebuilding process in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that demolished the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Her solution was to collect and distribute items  needed by rescue workers such as power bars, saline solution, work gloves, flashlights, batteries and socks.  Later, she coordinated the delivery of meals to rescue workers. She had, in fact, done something.

Sills' remembrance was among what Glory's editors called "a collection of thoughts, reflections and true accounts of the September 11, 2001 Attack on America."  A production of Alpine, Calif-based SANDS Publishing under the direction of Diana Saenger, the journalists who voluntarily collected the stories, copy-edited them, and grouped them together by theme were,  in their way, doing exactly what Sarah Sills was doing—finding a way to do SOMETHING.

Journalists are soldiers on the front lines of history.  The stories they write, the quotes that they gather, provide source material for latter-day historians who, removed from the immediacy and the emotions of the events, can write about them dispassionately and comprehensively. 

The team behind Glory provided a service in assembling the thoughts of people who were near the World Trade Center when the planes hit, or who had loved ones there, or who immediately came to the aid of the victims, or reflected from afar upon the event's meaning. It is a service not only for those of us whose emotions are sufficiently settled to plunge back into the Sept. 11 chaos, but also an important service to historians of, say, the year 2151, who may try to reconstruct the event. 

I had a chance to browse through Glory  today, December 25, while most of the rest of the world was preoccupied with Christmas. The book had been loaned to me by Marilyn Forstot, a journalist and romance novel writer, who had been part of the team assembling and producing it.  

Marilyn, who compiled the time line for the book and also copy-edited the various submissions "not so much for length but for grammar" said in addition to depicting "the pain that everybody was feeling," Glory will help historians comprehend "the feeling of people helping people, caring about people, and the whole country, even the whole world...drawing together.  It was uplifting to see how good people could be to each other."

I've been on both sides of the journalism-historian equation.  For most of my life, I have been a journalist.  Stories on this website stretching back to 1997 cover less than a fifth of those I have had the privilege to report over a career that began as a UCLA student in 1962.  

In writing the biography, Louis Rose: San Diego's First Jewish Settler and Entrepreneur, I often turned to the pages of the San Diego Herald, a newspaper that chronicled the happenings in the small village of San Diego between 1850 and 1860.  The paper folded with the onset of the Civil War. How I, as a biographer, missed being able to read in a newspaper about that critical time period in Rose's life!

Marilyn and I will be among four writers joining together at 7 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 13, at our congregation, Tifereth Israel Synagogue, to discuss books we recently have written.  Gabriella Auspitz Labson will be discussing My Righteous Gentile. Howard Rubenstein will tell discuss his Maccabee:  an Epic in Free Verse based upon the Books of Maccabees. Co-sponsored by the Sisterhood and the Men's Club and open to the entire community, it promises to be an interesting evening.  — Donald H. Harrison