These two books represent strikingly different responses to the events of September 11; indeed in some respects they encompass radically divergent human reactions to tragedy of any sort. The Worlds in Collision collection is mostly cool, analytic and carefully reasoned; it contains a pooling of ideas from many different sources, an academic symposium in print. John Carroll’s book is highly personal, rhetorical and passionately grim. He calls it ‘a meditation’, but the tone is not one of quiet reflection, but of prophetic jeremiad. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne want to help us cope with an urgent political problem; Carroll wants to indict a spiritual disease and issue a call for cultural reform. The stock-in-trade of most of the contributors to Worlds in Collision is argument; for Carroll it is primarily metaphor.