This week's charts feature many commemoratives and stories about the heroes and victims of September 11. In addition to the seven titles on PW's Nonfiction list—Let's Roll, Let Freedom Ring, Longitudes & Attitudes, Breakdown, What We Saw, The Cell and Above Hallowed Ground—there are at least another seven among the next 15 hardcover nonfiction bestsellers. In the 12 months since that infamous day, there have been perhaps 300 books published about the attack and its aftermath; that is a record for any event. Looking back at the 2002 weekly PW lists so far, there have been about 25 bestsellers in the 9/11 category. While many would say that perhaps there are too many 9/11 titles, it is clear that the country's appetite for these books is very strong.

The big questions are: How long will this appetite last and will this be a strong category in the holiday gift-buying season? And while most of the top sellers are pictorial commemoratives and stories about the heroes, especially firefighters, some of the new books on the list focus on the blame aspect, e.g., Hyperion's The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It and Regnery's Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11. There are also insightful essays; the most successful so far: Farrar, Straus & Giroux's Longitudes & Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 by New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman.

For the time being, the only way to assess the success of this category is to look at the stats. Pulitzer Prize—winner Friedman was live on Good Morning America on September 10 and appeared on TV and radio shows—Charlie Rose, Today, BBC and NPR's Talk of the Nation— on September 11. His 16-city tour will keep him on the road through October 3. FSG has 195,000 copies in print after three trips to press. Veteran news correspondent John Miller (co-host of ABC's 20/20 and the last Western journalist to have seen Osama bin Laden alive), coauthor of The Cell, has also been extremely visible on the national media. His book has 80,000 copies in print after three printings. Bill Gertz, defense and national security reporter for the Washington Times, has also been very visible; his book, Breakdown, had a 130,000-copy first printing.

Of the books that record the events of 9/11, Simon & Schuster's What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001, in Words, Pictures, and Video collects CBS news photos, films and archives and includes a two-hour DVD, anchored by Dan Rather; there are 400,000 copies in print after two trips to press. One of the first books on 9/11, One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001, was available last year in time for the holiday season. By the editors of Life magazine, with an introduction by Rudolph Giuliani, it had 375,000 copies in print by mid-December after four trips to press and had a seven-week run on the PW charts. According to Little, Brown, there are now more than 800,000 copies in print after 12 trips to press. 9/11 widow Lisa Beamer's Let's Roll hit the charts on September 2 with 800,000 copies. According to Tyndale, that number is now up to 905,000. Regan Books' Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, 2001 (it's #16 on our list) had just over 60,000 copies in print right at the end of August; 10 days later, that number was up to 71,000.