“powerfully sublime manipulations of language” link to a review of Nick Tosches’s In the Hand of Dante – because I want more

The dialectical mutations of each phase of the attacks and their aftermath came so rapidly that every successive generation lasted half as long as its predecessor. Mourning by the end of the day, dirty jokes by the end of the week. Newspaper headlines contracted from banner size before the end of the month. There was a war, organized quickly, prosecuted swiftly, and now the Turks are spearheading the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. Discussions about blowback, or POW status, or Arabic-speakers in the CIA, or insurance protections, or ground troops, or what Phase II meant, or civil liberties, or anthrax happened so fast that it was as if we were trying to outrace the limits of our deracinated memories.