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by Louis E. V. Nevaer (Editor)
Were the individuals who died on September 11, 2001 destined to die that day? In 1927, Thorton Wilder published a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, that tells the story of the individuals who perished in the collapse of a rope bridge in the Andes mountain ranges of Peru. In that narrative, Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk, embarks on a quest to find a cosmic answer to the question why those specific individuals died that day when the bridge collapsed. Hundreds of people crossed the bridge every day. Why were these individuals crossing the bridge at the exact moment when the bridge collapsed? The philosophical questions Wilder asks in his work of fiction are the same ones contemplated with anguish almost three quarters of a century later. Why did those specific passengers and crewmembers board those specific planes? Why were those 125 individuals at the Pentagon in those specific offices that morning? Why were the individuals at the World Trade Center there on that Tuesday-and not anywhere else? Why were so many first responders trapped at the site that would henceforth be known as Ground Zero? Was it in the stars? In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder concludes that "there is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." Perhaps the same can be said of the events of September 11, 2001. This book includes the names and birth dates of all who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
