I was deeply moved by Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers before I even opened the book. As a Manhattanite, the World Trade Center's twin towers used to be my New York City lodestone. With my lousy sense of direction, I always knew where I was by marking my location in relation to the two buildings, soaring skyward, so visible above everything else. Three years after 9/11, I still sometimes forgot and looked towards the southwest, expecting to see the buildings' lights.

For days, weeks, months after September 11, I saw, in my mind's eye, almost exactly the same image portrayed on the cover of In The Shadow Of No Towers -- darkest black shadows of the two landmarks against a night sky -- emptiness during the daylight. There is no more eloquent description to mark absence, to recall violence and infamy, than Mr. Spiegelman's depiction of these two shadows.

Mr. Spiegelman is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Maus, where he used the medium of comic strips to portray the Holocaust, his parents' experience as survivors of Auschwitz, and his own experience as a child of Holocaust victims. Ironically, his parents taught him at an early age to "always keep my bags packed." He writes in Shadow's Introduction, an extraordinary essay itself, "I tend to be easily unhinged. Minor mishaps -- a clogged drain, running late for an appointment -- send me into a sky-is-falling tizzy. It's a trait that leaves one ill-equipped for coping when the sky actually falls." And the sky literally fell on the author and his family that day. They lived in the towers' shadow, in TriBeca, and their daughter was in school that morning -- Stuyvesant High School, on the northern edge of Ground Zero -- a tizzy-producing experience if there ever was one!!

This unusual hybrid book, 42 oversized pages printed on heavy card stock, is a combination of comic strip illustrations and prose. It is an extremely personal memoir of the attacks on the WTC, which Spiegelman and his family witnessed at close range. It is a raving rant about the after-effects of the violence and its repercussions throughout the world at large, as well as the smaller interior world of the author's psyche. It is the intimate story of one family trying to cope. It is an editorial about the political exploitation of this terrible event. The book is designed to be read vertically, just like the old comic strip broadsheets that once appeared in newspapers. Each strip is a story, ten of them, followed by a comic supplement.

One notable image, seemingly burned onto Spiegelman's eyelids, is the last sight he had of the North Tower just before it fell: the building's skeleton, its very bones, lit up and glowing right before it vaporized. This image reoccurs throughout the book.

The country, the world, had seemingly already become inured to the unthinkable, just three years later, when Shadow was first published. The further away one lives from Ground Zero, the more removed the event. Art Spiegelman has given us a strange gift with his book -- an honest memory of a devastating tragedy; a memory that depicts humor as well as horror, confusion, terror and heartbreak. All of us must move on, move forward. Oddly enough, Spiegelman's book helps us to do so by chronicling 09/11/01 and its aftermath, allowing us to let its vividness go.

"Still time keeps flying and even the New normal gets old... [T]hough three years later I am still ready to lose it all at the mere drop of a hat or a dirty bomb. I still believe the world is ending, but I concede that it seems to be ending more slowly than I once thought...so I figured I'd write this book."

A beautiful book worth reading, worth keeping.

Jana Perskie is a Human Resource Consultant who has lived in Manhattan for almost 30 years. Before that she lived in Latin America & Iran for 15 years working for an NGO and doing other "stuff." She loves the City and was about 10 blocks away from the Twin Towers when the 1st plane hit. She saw the second plane strike and lost neighbors (3 in her building, including a Captain in the fire dept), friends and colleagues on 9/11. She still grieves. She volunteered at Nino's restaurant, on Canal Street, which served food 24/7 to those working at ground zero.

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