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THE GROUND TRUTH: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11, by John Farmer (Riverhead, $16.) ''Whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation's response to the 9/11 attacks,'' writes Farmer, who was senior counsel to the 9/11 commission. His study of newly available transcripts from federal agencies refutes later claims by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz that the military was ready to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 before it could hit Washington; in fact, the plane had already crashed by the time the Northeast Air Defense Sector learned of its hijacking. ''No one told us anything,'' one military pilot recalled. CHRONIC CITY, by Jonathan Lethem (Vintage Contemporaries, $15.95.) Set in an alternate-reality Manhattan where a tiger is rumored to be roaming the streets and a gray fog has descended on the financial district, this novel about the friendship between a former child actor and a fading cultural critic is ''knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to walk a straight line,'' our reviewer, Gregory Cowles, said. It was one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE GROUND TRUTH The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]