The government report that's a real page-turner

The 9/11 Commission Report
Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
W.W. Norton. 567 pp. $10

If it were titled just 9/11 and arrived as the big summer book of a star nonfiction author - say, Robert Caro - it couldn't be doing better.

By late afternoon yesterday, The 9/11 Commission Report had sold out at both Barnes & Noble and Borders in Center City, as well as at some other area stores, with hundreds of copies gone.

Across the country, it remained, as it has been since Friday, the No. 1 best-seller on www.amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

So now it's time for a little respect.

Time for critics to elbow one another aside to praise the depth of the report's interviewing (1,200 individuals in 10 countries), the scope of its archival research (2.5 million documents examined), and much else.

Time to appreciate the richness of its context (chapters outlining the growth of Islamic jihadism and development of the U.S. intelligence community), the authoritativeness of its tone, the fairness of its perspective, and - last but not least when a governmental report waddles and quacks like a book - its brisk readability. (Nabokov fans may wince, but hardly a sentence stretches beyond four clauses.)

In short, it's an airport read, worthy of Tom Clancy - though maybe Terminal read (with a nod to Tom Hanks) captures it better, given the length. This Report steals a leaf from modern thriller storytelling, effectively shaking up chronology by jumping back and forth. No wonder it's vying with Anna Karenina as one of the best-selling paperbacks of the season.