The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón

Often, graphic novels can be used to make what is a confusing book or play or even report easier to read and understand. This graphic novel attempts to do the same with the 9/11 Comission Report.

Th book is broken up into thirteen chapters, starting with one entitled "We Have Some Planes", which lays out the events of the day into an understandable format, showing what was happening with the four hijacked planes in a side-by-side timeline, and the response from the agencies, the government and the emergency services.

The second chapter looks at how Osama Bin Laden rose to power, and what is driving the fanatacism of Islamic Terrorism in the middle east. The Third chapter looks at how and why the efforts of the US and other nations to fight terrorism have evolved, and why they are still not very effective. The Fourth through Tenth chapters deal with Al-Queda's focussing on Terror against the US, and deal with the bomb exploded against the Twin Towers in 1993, and the lead-up to the attack on 9/11. The 11th Chapter deals with foresight and Hindsight, and how the US could have known what was to happen, and why the clear signals were ignored, or not shared between agencies. The two last chapters have the comission's findings on the causes for why the attack was not stopped, and what will have to change in the future to ensure that it never happens again. Finally, there is a postscript and acknowledgements.

I said at the beginning that the graphic novel format makes the information clearer and easier to understand, and this book certainly does that. However, after the interest of the first chapter, the book quickly becomes a very boring read that covers the past in such a dull way that I found my eyes drifting across the page without really registering much of what it was saying. In short, if the graphic novel version was so deadly dull, I can only imagine that the written form of the report could double for full-strength sleeping pills for those unable to get rest. And it wasn't that I wasn't really interested in reading it, just that it was presented in such a dry way.

The only chapters that escape this sort of dullness is the first and final two chapters of the book, which are much more interesting, not enough to save the book as a whole from the deadly dullness curse, but better than the rest.

If you are having trouble reading the original report in its pure writing form, you might want to give this a try. Neither really make for light reading or stuff that most people will find fascinating, but the graphic novel is a more visual medium and does reduce the book's contents from over 300 pages of nothing but text to something like 130 pages of text and mostly pictures. If you are looking for a less sleep-inducing version to read, I highly recommend this version of the 9/11 report. But unfortunately, the dullness creeps in, so this isn't a guaranteed page-turner.