Since September 12, 2001, the American media have churned out a remarkable body of work on our nation’s response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The issue has been hashed out in newspapers and magazines, fiction and nonfiction books, documentary and feature films; yet the question of why we reacted the way we did—with a paroxysm of muscular rhetoric and military might—has never been addressed head on. Instead, the dialogue has generally centered on whether the way in which we reacted was appropriate, and, if it wasn’t, what we should do about it. Now, nearly six years later, Susan Faludi, the feminist author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has written a sweeping historical analysis of why our nation—as reflected in the American media—reacted to the 9/11 attacks by “cocooning ourselves in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom’s childhood,” a domestic Leave it to Beaver-like fantasy. According to Faludi, our return to a fifties-era culture of masculine strength and feminine weakness was an attempt “to repair and restore a national myth” of invincibility. Faludi, whose previous two books, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of The American Man, were devoted to gender issues, broadens her scope in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, yet sticks with gender as her true north. “This is not a book about what September 11 ‘did’ to women or men, no matter how absurd or insulting the mantras of post-9/11 ‘new traditionalism’ may have been to its targets,” declares Faludi. “This is a book about why we responded the way we did to 9/11.” Our cultural regression, Faludi argues, belongs “to a long-standing American pattern of response to threat, a response that we’ve been perfecting since our original wilderness experience.”

Much like in Backlash, Faludi begins...

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