Books That Mattered

This week's bestseller charts reflect sales for the week ending September 10, the day before everything changed in New York, the U.S. and the world. It would be easy to surmise that book sales plummeted after the horrific terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. In Manhattan, droves of people were buying postcards of a New York skyline that no longer was. It seems as if the traffic on Amazon.com's list reflected a similar activity. On September 12, the day after "The Attack on America," four of the top five books on the e-retailer's list were: Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center by Angus Kress Gillespie (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1999); The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism by Simon Reeve (Northeastern Univ. Press, 1999); Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York City's World Trade Center by Eric Darton (Basic Books, Jan. 2001); and Nostradamus : The Complete Prophecies (Element, 1999). On September 13, there were four other Nostradamus titles among the top 10. Also high on Amazon's list was Jack: Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch from Warner Books. Its one-day laydown was September 11, but his launch press conference was canceled. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at one of his many press conferences about the attacks thanked Welch's company, GE, for its $10-million contribution to the victims of the WTC disaster and their families.