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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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| Book | Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library | ADULT GRAPHIC/92/TORRES, A. | 31482002130378 | Searching... Unknown |
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"At the heart of "American Widow" is the notion of Sept. 11 as a personal, rather than a national or political, tragedy, which, this achingly tender work reminds us, is exactly what it was." -- LA Times
Want to honor those who passed during 9-11? Turn off the stupid documentary glorifying all of those images we've seen over and over, and read this sincere account of how that fateful day effected one person that represents all of us." -- Aint It Cool News
"[A] raw, occasionally maddening, bracing graphic memoir... Unbearably moving." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Reading it, you feel that Torres could be your friend or neighbor; she makes an epic tragedy intimate." -- Newsday
On September 10, 2001, Eddie Torres started his dream job at Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The next morning, he said goodbye to his 7½-months-pregnant wife, Alissa, and headed out the door.
In an instant, Alissa's world was thrown into chaos. Forced to deal with unimaginable challenges, Alissa suddenly found herself cast into the role of "9/11 widow," tossed into a storm of bureaucracy, politics, patriotism, mourning, consolation, and, soon enough, motherhood.
Beautifully and thoughtfully illustrated, American Widow is the affecting account of one woman's journey through shock, pain, birth, and rebirth in the aftermath of a great tragedy. It is also the story of a young couple's love affair: how a Colombian immigrant and a strong-minded New Yorker met, fell in love, and struggled to fulfill their dreams. Above all, American Widow is a tribute to the resilience of the human heart and the very personal story of how one woman endured a very public tragedy.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Torres's husband, Eddie, started work at Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center on September 10, 2001. The next day, Alissa became one of the terrorist widows of 9/11. American Widow chronicles Alissa's first year without Eddie--including the birth of their child, two months after his death. It also traces their courtship, marriage and the last few days of Eddie's life. This deeply personal book is at times raw, angry, bleak and lyrical. The best prose comes out of Torres's moments of pure, lonely grief, which punctuate her confusing and at times horrifying experiences with various aid agencies, family members, friends and strangers. Choi's art is reminiscent of the work of Andi Watson and Craig Thompson, and complements Torres's writing by emphasizing the ordinary in Alissa's extraordinary circumstances. Torres and Choi do best with the confusion and shock that come with a sudden death, laying out scene after scene without quite connecting them--just as events seem to go on and on without meaning when one has lost someone important. What this book lacks in technique and narrative drive, it makes up in its heartfelt look at the universality in one woman's loss. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A graphic memoir renders the trials of being a 9/11 widow. Torres relates in mostly broad strokes how she grappled with losing her husband when she was seven months pregnant. Eddie Torres, a native of Colombia, had arrived in America several years before and risen from sweatshop laborer to currency broker at Cantor Fitzgerald. His first day at his new job was September 10, 2001. The bulk of the memoir details the cruel comedy of his widow's interactions with the bureaucratic alphabet soup of NGOs and government agencies set up to help people like her, a process with numerous extra tangles because Eddie had recently been hired and his original legal status was muddy. Torres conveys weary outrage at being treated more like a symbol than a person. She cynically writes of her troubled delivery: "They handled me kindly, as a V.I.P., because I had a post-9/11 baby to deliver. Gently, gently, they cut the widow open and took out the orphaned prize." She also decries the mindless invective hurled at 9/11 widows after the media circus decided that they were lazy money-grubbers. Torres scores a few points here and there, but her gauzy and distant authorial perspective dilutes the anger, and a strange lack of detail weakens the book's message. The casual meanness thrown her way is certainly revolting, but readers know so little about her day-to-day life other than her dealings with aid agencies that it's hard to empathize with her. Stiff, blue-tinted art by New York Times illustrator Choi adds little immediacy to the narrative. Muted outrage produces muted results. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Torres met her Colombian husband in New York in 1998, and she and Eduardo were parents-to-be when he left for the second day of his new job in the World Trade Center on 9/11. She describes the specific pains of emotional loss, exploitation by the news media, perhaps unintentional slights by friends and family, the bureaucratic meanness of government and charities, childbirth, and maternal anxiety. She recognizes her battle with self-pity and inertia and shares the reasoned responses she developed to cope with daily tasks and Red Cross demands on her strength of character. She doesn't depict herself or Eduardo in heroic terms, which makes her account all the more gripping. She argued with him one day and never got to resolve it the next. He remains a presence in her life, despite his dramatic death. Expressive in feature and flow, Choi's black-and-white panels, sparingly touched with gray, force the reader to see through Torres' eyes, effectively making her reality palpable and demanding a response that is neither rhetorical nor impersonal.--Goldsmith, Francisca Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In this graphic memoir, Alissa Torres recounts losing her husband on 9/11. A FEW years back in these pages Walter Kirn took aim at the triteness of what might be called the shocked-onlooker strain of 9/11 writing. The banality of accounts that began along the lines of "I was feeding the cat when a friend called and told me to turn on the TV" were, for Kirn, irrelevant to the enormity of the circumstances. "American Widow," Alissa Torres's raw, occasionally maddening, bracing graphic memoir, shows how those same seemingly trite details, coming from someone whose life was shattered by the attacks, can convey what it means to have your existence broken off by an event that cannot fit into any familiar frame of reference. Torres's husband, Eddie, a Colombian who had been working as a currency broker in the United States, began a job at Cantor Fitzgerald on Sept. 10, 2001. He was one of the 685 employees of the company killed the next day in the mass murder at the World Trade Center. Alissa was pregnant with their son. "American Widow," illustrated in simple black, white and light blue by the artist Sungyoon Choi, is a sometimes prickly counter to the narrative of 9/11 as a time when New Yorkers came together selflessly, bound by shared tragedy. Torres isn't denying the phenomenon. But by insisting on the solitary, isolating nature of grief, she is implying that the feeling of community was easier to grasp for those of us lucky enough not to have lost anyone. The community she finds - as in her fleeting connection with someone who, like herself, is posting "missing" posters in the slim hopes of locating a loved one - is very small. Even in the company of other victims' relatives, Torres feels alone. When she lunches with other women who lost their husbands ("I hope we bomb them all!" says one; "I agree," another says), she sits gloomily apart. There's an unfortunate bit of superiority in that sequence, an implicit judgment passed on women who want to see their husbands' murderers punished, who want to see the entire mind-set that gave rise to the killings wiped out. Torres is turned off by something quite human: the desire for revenge after the trauma of pain and loss. What's inhuman is to expect people who have suffered outrageously to rise to a shining standard of virtue and forgiveness. Paradoxically, it's Torres's refusal to see beyond her personal experience that gives "American Widow" its power. Torres recounts her alienation from friends, many of whom get to the "enough is enough" phase with her a few months after Eddie's death. And she flinches at the bullying commentators, from the political left to the right, who portrayed 9/11 widows as publicity-hungry media vultures. "American Widow" is particularly barbed in its depiction of the incompetence, and sometimes the callousness, of aid organizations and government agencies assisting the victims. In one scene a haggard American Red Cross representative tells Torres the organization will contact her "when we can" about flying Eddie's relatives from Colombia for the funeral, which is only a few days away. You could argue that these people were stretched to the limit. You could also argue that there are some jobs simply too sensitive to mismanage - a standard embodied here by a competent and compassionate F.B.I. agent who steps in and takes charge after Torres's encounter with the Red Cross. "American Widow" is a contrary beast for its depiction of a series of missed connections in a time venerated for the way it unified people. These incidents are sometimes unbearably moving, as when the smile of a maternity-shop clerk deflates after she's told Torres is shopping for a black dress. Even as Torres delineates her experience, her story tells those of us lucky enough not to have lost someone on Sept. 11 that we'd be foolish to believe we can share it. Eddie Torres, his wife seven months'pregnant, started a new job at Cantor Fitzgerald on Sept. 10, 2001. Charles Taylor is a columnist for The Newark Star-Ledger and Bloomberg News.
Library Journal Review
"How would the world change if you never came back?" In this moving graphic memoir, Torres chronicles how she copes with the loss of her husband on 9/11. (LJ 11/15/08) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.