I can’t remember where I saw the recommendation, but I decided to try The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff and found it a riveting read. Heavy, of course, but also very illuminating about how quickly and widely the September 11 attacks rippled beyond downtown Manhattan, affecting a lot of people in different ways and different places almost all at once.

I was about to turn 14 at the time. I saw the footage like everyone else and understood it to be a significant event, but I couldn’t have known all the details of the day that the book brings to life all these decades later.

For that reason I’m very grateful to Graff for this monumental work of oral history, which captures the kaleidoscopic nature of the crisis by weaving testimonies from the myriad people affected by the attacks, including:

• people in the World Trade Center and Pentagon who managed to evacuate after the planes crashed (and even some who somehow survived the subsequent collapses)
• firefighters and first responders at Ground Zero
• people desperately waiting to find out whether their loved ones had survived
• transcripts of calls and voicemails from passengers of the hijacked planes
• air traffic controllers managing the unprecedented grounding of all aircraft across the United States
• fighter pilots ordered to intercept Flight 93 and take it down by any means necessary, including crashing into it midair
• Dick Cheney and White House staffers managing the crisis from an underground bunker
• Congressional representatives and staffers scrambling away from the Capitol with reports of more hijacked airplanes on the way
• Staffers with President Bush in Florida when they got news of the attacks, then on Air Force One as they flew between military bases before heading back to D.C.

One recurring motif that really stuck out to me was how often life or death came down to sheer luck, both good and bad.

One man had to leave his desk high up in the World Trade Center to retrieve a guest in the lobby, which allowed him to escape after the crash and avoid certain death. Another woman was standing at the copier instead of her desk when a plane struck and thus survived when all her other office mates nearby perished. And one firefighter fleeing one of the collapsing Twin Towers alongside a colleague turned one way and lived, while his colleague turned the other way and didn’t.

Call it luck or something else—we’re all a split-second away from death, often without knowing it. The Only Plane in the Sky honors those who were unlucky that day, and serves as a sobering reminder for the rest of us about the fragility of life and the extraordinary bravery of ordinary people.