SUBTITLED "Great Decisions and How They Were Made" this book is worth the price for its final piece alone.

"Todd Beamer and Flight 93" describes how passengers on one of the four planes hi-jacked for the terrorist attack on the USA on September 11, 2001, tackled the hi-jackers, bringing down the plane before it reached its target.

Pieced together from cockpit recordings and phone messages, the traumatic episode is heart-stopping. Axelrod tells it straight - and to gripping effect.

A phone operator on the line to passenger Todd Beamer "heard him take a deep breath. She could tell he was still holding the phone, but that he had turned away from it to talk to someone else.

"Are you ready?" she heard. "OK. Let's roll! That was the moment."

After describing the drama in all its gut-wrenching confusion, the piece goes on: "Lisa Beamer (Todd's wife) recognised "Let's roll!' as typical Todd Beamer.

It was the phrase he often used with their boys.'' But it wasn't just the passengers on Flight 93 who showed extraordinary courage. One passenger, Jeremy Glick, told his wife back home that he and others were going to take a vote on whether to rush the hi-jackers.

"What do you think we should do?" he asked her. "Go for it," Lyz Glick answered.

She had been watching television.

She knew they had no other choice.

Rosa Parks and her defiant bus protest yields a comparably-compelling account from Axelrod, a prolific US author. Most of his 44 pieces concern established major figures from his own country - President Truman and the A-bomb, Kennedy and the moon, etc. Britain comes in a tad too predictably, with Boudicca's resistance of the Romans, William the Conqueror's invasion, Elizabeth I's defeat of the Armada, and Edmund Hilary's Conquest of Everest.

It's all highly readable, but best when Axelrod departs from the beaten track.

"Charlie Goodnight and the First Cattle Drive" fascinatingly explains "the decision that created the cowboy". But Todd Beamer and "Let's roll'' still, humblingly, steals the show.