What happened after 9/11 was of monumental proportions while remaining largely invisible at the time. Trauma succeeded fear and was displaced by a thirst for revenge. The Bush administration both set precedents for and reflected Americans' response to the attacks on 9/11. The book focuses on different themes in each chapter - trauma and patriotic fervor, revenge, the turn to religion and away from science, the cult of secrecy, the surveillance society, the militarization of American civil society, the acceptance of torture, and the creation of an unregulated free market. Each chapter traces the connection between government policies and practices and individual Americans' beliefs and behavior. Have the years 2001-2008 forever changed American culture and undercut Americans' belief in an ever-improving future? Or will Americans abandon fear for hope and a renewed sense of national unity?

The second revised edition (in e-book only) has had all the links in the notes updated and contains a new Postscript: Twenty Years Later, which traces the connections between 9/11 and the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

This critical study applies different literary theories to the novel, revealing the plurality of meanings inherent in it, while avoiding the use of technical language that theorists are prone to employ. Its nine chapters clearly indicate the theoretical lenses through which the novel is looked at: Genesis; Genre; the Psychoanalytic Perspective; History, Class and Society; Lawrence and Women;  Structure, Theme and Form; Narrative Voice and Focus; Character; and Symbolic Motifs. Seen from these various perspectives, Sons and Lovers reveals a proliferation of meaning that reflects the writer's deep ambivalence and offers the reader a multiplicity of interpretations.

This short book was the first to focus on five such works he published between 1965 and 1970 - Imagination Dead Imagine; Enough; Ping; Lessness; and The Lost Ones. Finney analyzes each work from a different vantage point - the mania for disorder, the artist's excavation of the humans' suffering interior, his figurative use of light and dark, his paradoxical representation of changelessness as continuous change, the way the perceiver infects what is perceived, the impossible search for artistic failure, and his preoccupation with form. The book incorporates Beckett's answers to the author's written questions to him. Since How It Is offers a lucid commentary and analysis of these condensed and powerful compositions written by the outstanding writer of his time.