This is a great and exciting book; a volume filled with stories of endeavor, achievement, appraisal and learning; stories of heroism, challenge and hope. It will become a handbook for all who would research the impact of disaster and terrorism on mental health and well-being. It is a courageous contribution to the science of this field in giving testimony to the research that was done to assess need, to study reactions over time, and to provide and evaluate the best possible care. It is also courageous in that the research is presented openly, with its challenges, its successes, its imperfections, and with critical appraisal provided by “outside” experts. It is all the more powerful for this. It is the most comprehensive drawing together of the wide range of initiatives that followed a specific incident, initiatives that were implemented in the times of chaos and uncertainty. It was instigated by researchers and clinicians who were, at the time, themselves also experiencing the multiple, acute and subsequent stressors of the attack and its aftermath. It is a further contribution in terms of the universal wish to make meaning of what has happened. As mental health professionals and scientists, this surely, is one of our ways of making meaning.

A number of themes thread their way through this book: The enormity, unexpectedness and uniqueness of what happened; not only was America assaulted, but the world saw, and felt what happened.