[In the following review, Lord examines Jere Longman's Among the Heroes, praising the book's focus on individual people and their stories.]

The occupants of the hijacked airliner that crashed outside Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, 2001, were not passive victims, Jere Longman, a reporter for The New York Times, argues in Among the Heroes. Rather, they were defiant combatants.

In a powerful reconstruction of the flight's final moments—largely assembled from interviews with family members, co-workers and friends of the dead, who shared either tapes or recollections of phone calls made from the plane—Longman suggests that the travelers banded together to resist their captors. They tried to use boiling water from the galley as a weapon and, shielded by a food cart, stormed the cockpit in an attempt to overpower the terrorists who had seized control of the plane. This act didn't lead to a cartoon victory, as it might have in a Hollywood movie, but it wasn't futile. The plane crashed in an open field. Had it traveled just a few minutes more, it could have wiped out a cluster of houses or a school. Had it traveled 20 minutes more, it could have obliterated what is believed to have been its target, the White House, even as American Flight 77 destroyed a portion of the Pentagon.

Among the Heroes isn't an easy book to read, but because it doesn't portray its subjects as helpless, it offers a kind of solace. At times, it almost seems like a call to arms.

Purely by chance, the flight's crew and passengers were atypically suited to resist a hijacking. A large number were former high-school and college athletes who had stayed in shape. On board were a former police officer, an emergency medical technician and a federal agent trained in close-quarter fighting. Many of the passengers had skills like those of the policewoman-turned-flight-attendant who “knew how to stun someone with a chop to the neck, how to retain her weapon during a fight, how to gouge at someone with a fingernail file, how to find weak points in an attacker's knee and groin.” They were people, in other words, who can make you believe that fitness, cunning and bravery might still count for something when pitted against a ruthless enemy.

The book opens with an image of startling tranquillity: the clear blue sky over Newark, where Flight 93 took off. From there, Longman moves back and forth between the members of his cast of characters, advancing his narrative as he sketches out portraits of the people on the plane—37 passengers, two pilots, five flight attendants and four hijackers. The book is fastidiously factual and never lurches into hyperbole, yet it is hard not to view the onboard drama as a metaphor for the country's larger war on terrorism.

Longman's heroes are as multicultural as a space shuttle crew and, through their diversity, an emblem of the American pluralism the terrorists wished to destroy. They range from a 52-year-old white aerospace executive whose mother was a member of the family that founded Saks Fifth Avenue to a black flight attendant who had been a teenage mother but “righted herself without falling into despair or public assistance.” Nor does Longman clobber the reader with their rainbow identity. Rather than trumpeting the affectional preferences of Waleska Martinez, a computer whiz in the Census Bureau's New York office, or Mark Bingham, a former University of California rugby player, he unobtrusively quotes their same-sex partners.

Many of the passengers were also devout Christians. A few years earlier, Tom Burnett, the chief operating officer of a company that manufactured heart pumps, felt he had been “called to do something.” During lunch hours, he began attending Mass to help him figure out what. Andrew Garcia named his industrial-products business Cinco Group, using Cinco as an acronym for Christ in Company. And Todd Beamer, whose rallying cry, “Let's roll,” was popularized after the attacks as a slogan for resistance, taught Sunday school. In a gripping moment that in the hands of a less skilled journalist might have seemed hackneyed, Beamer and a telephone operator he has reached in an air-to-ground call join in reciting the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm.

Although Longman's book doesn't try for Miltonian language, it recalls Milton in its effort to put a human face on the perpetrators of evil. Longman casts the hijacker pilot Ziad Jarrah, for example, as a sort of fallen bourgeois who renounced his Western sympathies. Growing up middle-class in Lebanon, Jarrah “played basketball and took disabled kids camping and volunteered in an antidrug program”—activities much like those some of Flight 93's crew and passengers had engaged in. Jarrah even looked, as an acquaintance told Longman, like “the type of guy you bring home to Mom.” But after spending time in Europe, he grew disillusioned with non-Islamic culture and sacrificed his individuality to a terrorist “it” that, in Longman's terms, “had a shaved face and bristled coarsely inside,” an “it” that “danced, drank liquor, entered sexual relationships before marriage, wove itself into the complacent fabric of the West.”

Also figuring in Longman's account of Flight 93 is the plane itself, a Boeing 757. The book begins with a suggestion of how commonplace long-distance air travel has become, as the passengers concern themselves with schedules and meetings and personal plans, not the dangers of transcontinental flight. But after the hijacking, rolling and pitching at over 500 miles an hour, they suddenly see the plane as the weapon it always had the potential to become. “This was not like ‘Sky King’ in the 1950's, where Daddy conks out and Timmy's flying the plane and they talk him down and everyone's happy,” a spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association explained. Nor was it clear whether Jarrah, who had not exactly aced flight school, knew what he was doing. After 200 hours of flying, an instructor recalled, Jarrah “was a guy who needed some more.” Longman doesn't say whether the amateur pilots aboard the plane could have safely landed it. But he never suggests that the heroes of his book's title lost control of their destiny. Flight 93, he convincingly argues, was not, as some conspiracy theorists propose, shot down.

Unexpectedly, Among the Heroes made me think of John Hersey's Hiroshima. Like Longman's book, Hersey's account of the dropping of the atomic bomb was published a year after the event. It also told a larger story by focusing on a few individuals, just as Longman's book concentrates on the people on the plane. At the time of the publication of Hiroshima, some critics faulted Hersey for this close-in reporting, the kind that you see around any disaster—a fire, an earthquake, a flood. Mary McCarthy felt it rendered the enormity of the circumstances banal. To have done the event justice, she contended, Hersey “would have had to interview the dead.”

Technology has evolved a great deal since 1946, when Hersey's story appeared. Through taped air-to-ground phone conversations that preserved their final words and thoughts, this arresting achievement—seeing into the hearts of those who did not survive—is precisely what Longman has been able to accomplish.