THE UNFINISHED BOMBING: Oklahoma City in American Memory
By Edward T. Linenthal. Oxford Univ. Press. 304 pp. $30
THE UNFINISHED BOMBING: Oklahoma City in American Memory.
By Edward T. Linenthal. Oxford Univ. Press. 304 pp. $30 Death is a cultural commodity in the work of Linenthal, empathic chronicler of acts of civic memory. He has already written books on battlefield preservation and the Holocaust Museum, and now he poses anew the question, How do Americans seek to purify or sanctify scenes of mass violence? The Unfinished Bombing, while obviously not conceived as such, is also counterpart to future books on the World Trade Center tragedy. Linenthal’s account of the dedication of a grand memorial on April 19, 2000, the fifth anniversary of the Oklahoma City disaster, cannot but be read in anticipation of how New York will memorialize September 11, 2001. The Oklahoma City bombing occurred at 9:02 a.m., virtually the same time of day that Manhattan experienced what Linenthal terms the "last moments of ordinary time." Oklahoma City, too, offered symbols of unspeakable shock—blasted bits of paper settling like snow, a child’s charred sneaker, pagers going off inside the rubble—followed by makeshift memorials, diatribes about cowardice and evil, and, of course, initial assumptions of Muslim culpability. But this painstakingly researched book is less a tale of terror than a portrait of a community’s five-year campaign to restore peace to its collective heart by discovering an enduring lesson. Linenthal lays out the so-called progressive narrative (grit brings out the generous and good), the redemptive narrative (a victim’s father speaks out against capital punishment), and the toxic narrative ("we still find pieces of glass in our library books"). The book’s most indelible story concerns Baylee Almon, the one-year-old whose lifeless body in the arms of fireman Chris Fields became an iconic photographic image. Linenthal brilliantly captures the fetishization of Baylee and the rude exploitation of the baby’s mother, with entrepreneurs hawking T-shirts, statues, keychains, even a phone card that promised to "memorialize the tragedy...in a way that no other depiction ever could." Linenthal points a critical finger when he accounts for divisions among Oklahomans in deriving meaning from events or in arguing over who qualifies as a "survivor." He handles the design competition for the Oklahoma City memorial with similar skill. But he is often hesitant to criticize the voices he records. To read this book is to sit through an interminable parade of banality: citizens recommending that road signs near the site read "Drive Carefully / Angels Crossing," television commentators proclaiming the nation "one family." Subtle analysis could have replaced much of the democracy in these pages. As poignant as his words often are, Linenthal starts and stops with a portrait of the survivor mentality. He chooses not to speculate about the modern meaning of terror, or to address such issues as vengeance. Are there lessons to emerge from the crisis and its resolution? Yet perhaps the unsatisfying aftertaste on finishing this book isn’t the fault of the author. As Rev. Robert Wise remarked after seeing the remains of dismembered children from the Murrah Building, "We are not made to understand." —Andrew Burstein