One Day in July: Experiencing 7/7

“I don’t remember seeing a flash. I didn’t hear the blast—I was too close. Like a distorted film, my vision stretched and turned yellow. I was just three feet from the bomb.” On July 7, 2005, John Tulloch, a risk analyst and sociologist with expertise in how the media report major international events, found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The next day he was on the front page of virtually every major newspaper, having been sitting just three feet away from the suicide bomber on the Edgware Road tube train when it exploded. He had became a victim of the risk he knew so well in theory—he had become one of those media stories he was so used to analyzing. But he had also, like many others, become a victim of British and American foreign policy and been caught up, literally in a moment, in a terrible symbol of our particular time in history. From the three most recent wars—Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq—to media representations of disaster, from his own incredibly moving story to the relationships he built up with those who helped him, this compelling and profoundly important book is set to be a classic—a work that captures both a moment and an era with sensitivity and precision.