SOURCE: Lord, M. G. “The Fourth Target.” New York Times Book Review (8 September 2002): section 7, p. 12.

In the following review, Lord examines Jere Longman's Among the Heroes, praising the book's focus on individual people and their stories.

The occupants of the hijacked airliner that crashed outside Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, 2001, were not passive victims, Jere Longman, a reporter for The New York Times, argues in Among the Heroes. Rather, they were defiant combatants.

In a powerful reconstruction of the flight's final moments—largely assembled from interviews with family members, co-workers and friends of the dead, who shared either tapes or recollections of phone calls made from the plane—Longman suggests that the travelers banded together to resist their captors. They tried to use boiling water from the galley as a weapon and, shielded by a food cart, stormed the cockpit in an attempt to overpower the terrorists who had...