102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers. Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn - Softcover

Dwyer, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099492563 ISBN 13: 9780099492566

Publisher: Arrow Books, 2005

Synopsis

At 8.46 am on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the Twin Towers in New York - reading emails, making calls, eating croissants...over the next 102 minutes each would become part of a drama for the ages, one truly witnessed only by the people who lived through it - until now. Of the millions of words written about that unforgettable day, most have been from outsiders. "New York Times" reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have taken the more revealing approach - reporting solely from the perspective of those inside the towers, "102 Minutes" is the epic count of ordinary men and women, and includes incredible stories of bravery, courage and overcoming unbelievable odds including the construction manager and his colleagues who pried open the doors and saved dozens of people in the north tower; the police officer who was a few blocks away, filing his retirement papers, but grabbed his badge and sprinted to the buildings; the window washer stuck in a lift fifty floors up who used a squeegee to escape; and, the secretaries who led an elderly man down eighty-nine flights of stairs. Chance encounters, moments of grace, a shout across an office shaped these minutes, marking the border between fear and solace, staking the boundary between life and death. Crossing a bridge of voices to go inside the infernos seeing cataclysm and heroism one person at a time, Dwyer and Flynn tell the affecting, authoritative saga of the men and women - the 12,000 who escaped and the 2,749 who perished - as they made 102 minutes count as never before.

About this title

Review

In 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, New York Times writers Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn vividly recreate the 102-minute span between the moment Flight 11 hit the first Twin Tower on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the moment the second tower collapsed, all from the perspective of those inside the buildings--the 12,000 who escaped, and the 2,749 who did not. It's becoming easier, years later, to forget the profound, visceral responses the Trade Center attacks evoked in the days and weeks following September 11. Using hundreds of interviews, countless transcripts of radio and phone communications, and exhaustive research, Dwyer and Flynn bring that flood of responses back--from heartbreak to bewilderment to fury. The randomness of death and survival is heartbreaking. One man, in the second tower, survived because he bolted from his desk the moment he heard the first plane hit; another, who stayed at his desk on the 97th floor, called his wife in his final moments to tell her to cancel a surprise trip he had planned. In many cases, the deaths of those who survived the initial attacks but were killed by the collapse of the towers were tragically avoidable. Building code exemptions, communication breakdowns between firefighters and police, and policies put in place by building management to keep everyone inside the towers in emergencies led, the authors argue, to the deaths of hundreds who might otherwise have survived. September 11 is by now both familiar and nearly mythological. Dwyer and Flynn's accomplishment is recounting that day's events in a style that is stirring, thorough, and refreshingly understated. --Erica C. Barnett

About the Author

Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, native New Yorkers, veteran newspaper reporters, and winners of many awards together and separately, now work at the New York Times. Dwyer is the co-author of Two Seconds Under The World, an account of the 1993 effort to knock down the World Trade Centre, and of Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted. He is also the author of Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York City Subway. Flynn, a special projects officer at the Times, was the newspaper's police bureau chief on September 11th 2001. He previously worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News, New York Newsday and the Stamford Advocate.

About this edition

• Publisher: Arrow Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0099492563
• ISBN 13: 9780099492566
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352