Report from Ground Zero.(Brief Article)

Report from Ground Zero, by Dennis Smith (Viking; $24.95). The firstperson narratives in this account of the rescue efforts at the World Trade Center constitute a tremendously powerful chronicle of September 11th. The language of the firefighters and police officers is blunt and vivid, the details are sharply etched, and the fractured stories -- particularly of those who were inside the towers but somehow escaped -- offer a Cubist vision of the day's chaos. The book's description of the disaster's aftermath is less successful: Smith conveys the ritualistic and sacramental nature of the search for the victims' remains, but he lapses too frequently into sentimentality and abstract meditations on patriotism and courage. The author, who also wrote the gripping "Report from Engine Co. 82," does best when he lets the images speak for themselves: the airplane luggage scattered across the plaza; the waves of firemen disappearing into the stairwells; the indelible sound -- "like an M-80 firecracker," one man says -- of bodies hitting the ground; and the moment when suddenly there was "nothing but dust."

Breaking Clean, by Judy Blunt (Knopf; $24). Born in 1954 to poor homesteaders on the Montana prairie, the author inherited a tradition of intense work and fierce isolation. She realized early that she was doomed to a supporting role on the family ranch; although she could work cattle and tractors, she writes, "I also learned to . . . reserve my opinion when the men were talking." This unflinching memoir is framed by Blunt's eventual decision to leave the rancher she had married at the age of eighteen and the only way of life she'd ever known. A sense of mourning underlies her account, and she honors the land that she still loves by making us intimate with its smallest details: after a thirty-six-hour blizzard, cows stand frozen, "eyes sealed tight ...