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102 Minutes Paperback – August 2, 2011
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"102 Minutes does for the September 11 catastrophe what Walter Lord did for the Titanic in his masterpiece, A Night to Remember . . . Searing, poignant, and utterly compelling."―Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of An Army at Dawn
Hailed upon publication as an instant classic, the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction is now available in a revised edition to honor the anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
At 8:46 a.m. that morning, fourteen thousand people were inside the World Trade Center just starting their workdays, but over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages. Of the millions of words written about this wrenching day, most were told from the outside looking in. New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn draw on hundreds of interviews with rescuers and survivors, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts to tell the story of September 11 from the inside looking out.
Dwyer and Flynn have woven an epic and unforgettable account of the struggle, determination, and grace of the ordinary men and women who made 102 minutes count as never before.
102 Minutes is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateAugust 2, 2011
- Dimensions5.45 x 1 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-100805094210
- ISBN-13978-0805094213
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“A heart-stopping, meticulous account. . . . I suspect that you, like me, will read this book in a single suspenseful sitting, even though we know the ending.” ―James B. Stewart, The New York Times Book Review
“The chief virtue of 102 Minutes, Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn's unsparing, eloquent history of the struggle to survive inside the World Trade Center, is the authors' insistence that truth supplant myth. However comforting myths may be after a defeat, they're useless in assessing what went wrong and may actually be impediments to preventing future disasters.” ―John Farmer (former senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission), The Washington Post Book World
“An astounding reconstruction of what happened inside the World Trade Center. . . . These are stories, after all, you have to share.” ―Susannah Meadows, Newsweek
“Exhaustively researched and smoothly written. . . . Dwyer and Flynn's most impressive achievement: writing in a way that confers dignity on each subject. This is one book that will stay with most readers for a very long time.” ―Michelle Green, People
“For those of us haunted by the tragedy, an indispensable book.” ―O Magazine
“[A] harrowing, deeply reported, practically minute-by-minute and floor-by-floor portrayal. . . . Insightful, compassionate, and unrelievedly tense.” ―Michael Ollove, The Baltimore Sun
“A masterpiece of reporting....succinct...riveting enough to be read in a sitting...heart-wrenching...Brilliant and troubling.” ―Kevin Baker, New York Times
“Poignant, emotion-stirring and important...a story of how ordinary people exhibit extraordinary traits in times of peril.” ―Tom Walker, Denver Post
“It took the authors three years to describe what happened in 102 minutes...The book is worth the wait.” ―Ingrid Ahlgren, Providence Journal
“The writing - sometimes searing, sometimes factual but always appropriate - brings the human experience of disaster into focus.” ―Rosemary Herbert, Boston Herald
“Many of the stories are astounding; almost all are heartbreaking...They accord these men and women the honor they deserve.” ―Brian Palmer, Newsday
About the Author
Jim Dwyer (1957-2020) is the author of six works of nonfiction, including More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, and Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York Subways.
A Pulitzer Prize winner and native New Yorker, he was a columnist for The New York Times, The New York Daily News and Newsday.
Kevin Flynn, a special projects editor at The New York Times, was the newspaper's police bureau chief on September 11, having previously worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News, Newsday, and The Advocate (Stamford). He lives in Connecticut.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
102 Minutes
The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin TowersBy Jim DwyerTimes Books
Copyright © 2011 Jim DwyerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780805094213
1
"It's a bomb, let's get out of here."
8:46 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
A bomb, Dianne DeFontes thought, when thinking became possible again. At 8:46:30, an impact had knocked her off a chair in the law office on the 89th floor of the north tower, 1 World Trade Center. The door swung free, even though she had bolted it shut. In another part of the floor, Walter Pilipiak had just pushed open the door to the offices of Cosmos International, an insurance brokerage where he was president. Akane Ito heard him coming and looked up from her desk to greet him. Before Pilipiak could get the words "Good morning" out of his mouth, he felt something smack the back of his head, and he was hurled into a wall. Ceiling tiles collapsed on Ito. A bomb, they decided, several breaths later.
On the southwest end of the 89th floor, the insurance company MetLife had 10,000 square feet of space. After the initial slam, Rob Sibarium could feel every one of those square feet tilting as the tower bent south, so far that it seemed as if it would never recoil. It did, slowly returning to center. Something had happened in the other building, Sibarium thought. An explosion.
Mike McQuaid, the electrician installing fire alarms, was sure he knew what he was feeling: an exploding transformer, from a machine room somewhere below the 91st floor. Nothing else could rock the place with such power.
In the lobby, Dave Kravette had just ridden down from the Cantor Fitzgerald office to meet his guests, after ending the conversation with his wife about the newspaper delivery. Just a few steps out of the elevator, he heard a tremendous crash and what sounded like elevator cars free-falling. Then he saw a fireball blow out of a shaft. Around him, people dived to the ground. Kravette froze and watched the fireball fold back on itself.
She dropped the phone, Louis Massari would remember thinking. His wife, Patricia, had been reporting to him that she had bought a second home pregnancy test. The first one, that morning, had been positive, a surprise. Patricia worked as a capital analyst on the 98th floor of the north tower for Marsh & McLennan, an insurance and financial services concern; at night she took college courses. The pregnancy test was on her mind; it trumped, naturally, the test she was due to take that evening in her class and had been fretting over. So they had plenty to talk about.
"Oh, my God--" she said, and then Louis heard nothing. She had slipped, somehow, he was sure, and had pulled the cord out of the jack.
Higher still in the building, on the 106th floor, Howard Kane, the controller for Windows on the World, was speaking by phone with his wife, Lori. Kane dropped the receiver, or so it seemed to his wife, because the sounds of clamor and alarm, the high notes of anxiety if not the exact words, filled her ear. Maybe he was having a heart attack. Then she could hear a woman screaming, "Oh, my God, we're trapped," and her husband calling out, "Lori!"
Then another man picked up the phone, and spoke. "There's a fire," he said. "We have to call 911."
From the Risk Waters conference in Windows on the World, Caleb Arron Dack, a computer consultant, called his wife, Abigail Carter, on a cell phone. "We're at Windows on the World," Dack said. "There was a bomb." He could not get through to the police emergency line. He needed Abigail to call 911 for him. The bomb may have been in the bathroom.
At another breakfast, in a delicatessen a quarter mile below Windows on the World, the former director of the world trade department, Alan Reiss, had not heard, felt, or seen a thing. He sat with his back to the window that overlooked the plaza. Suddenly, one of the other Port Authority managers, Vickie Cross Kelly, looking past Reiss's shoulder to the window, called out.
"Something must have happened," she said. "People are running around on the mall." Reiss turned. He saw terrified people, sprinting in every direction. A person with a gun had set off the chaos, he guessed.
"I've got to go," Reiss said, tossing a five-dollar bill on the table, then headed for the trade center police office, one floor above them, in the low-rise building known as 5 World Trade Center. Through big plate-glass windows that faced east toward Church Street, he could see a blizzard of burning confetti. This was not as straightforward as someone with a gun. Another bomb?
In 1993, Reiss had just opened the door to his basement office when the terrorists' truck bomb exploded 150 feet away. Afterward, he had been part of the team that refitted the towers for better evacuation. As a matter of doctrine at the trade center, bombs were seen as a threat that could cause harrowing but local damage. They were unlikely to bring cataclysm.
In the weeks and months following the 1993 attack, the danger from a powerful bomb attack on the trade center, especially the two towers, had been considered by the Port Authority and its security consultants. Most experts agreed that while the towers could be hurt by a bomb, they could not be destroyed. Anyone might, in theory, sneak a bomb onto a floor, but the damage would largely be confined to 1 floor out of 110--or looked at another way, 1 acre out of 110. In general, bombs are as powerful as they are big. The larger the bomb, the bigger the explosion, the greater the damage. The 1993 terrorists had driven 1,200 pounds of explosive into the basement. Even so, the base of the towers, the strongest part of the buildings, easily deflected the explosion. Compared with the powerful load absorbed by the face of the towers from winds that blew every hour of every day, the truck bomb in the basement was puny.
Moreover, there was no simple way of getting 1,200 pounds of explosive to the upper floors, where the structure was not as dense as the base. If the monumentalism of the towers made them a natural target, their very height added protection, not vulnerability. Gravity was part of the built-in defense to the devastation of a big bomb.
From what Reiss could see, he was sure that someone had set off a big bomb. While it is true that small bombs--explosives fitted into a tape recorder or hidden inside a suitcase--can blow an airplane out of the sky, that destructiveness has less to do with the bomb than with the altitude. What rips apart the aircraft is not the size of the bomb but a rupture in the fuselage at 35,000 feet, with the lethal force coming from the difference between the cabin pressure and the atmosphere. Those forces are not present even at the top of skyscrapers as tall as the twin towers, limiting the destructive energy of a conventional bomb to its size.
By the time Reiss had run up one flight on the escalator, he guessed that a truck bomb must have blown up somewhere around the trade center.
Reiss no longer worked in the basement, as he had in 1993, and he wondered, fleetingly, who in his old department had arrived for work on the 88th floor of the north tower. Up there, no one had illusions about a truck bomb. The moment arrived as a powerful fist rocking the building. As soon as Gerry Gaeta, a member of the team that oversaw construction projects at the trade center, could find his words, he hollered, "It's a bomb, let's get out of here." And he was sure he knew how it had gotten up there. Moments earlier, a messenger had arrived with a trolley of documents for Jim Connors in the real estate department. Surely that was how the bomb had been wheeled in, Gaeta thought; the boxes of "documents" had been a Trojan horse.
Down the hall, Nicole De Martini had just drawn the last sip of her coffee and had risen to leave her husband's office to go to hers, in the south tower, when she and Frank heard a boom from overhead and felt the building lurch. Nicole watched a river of fire spill past the window in Frank's office. It was a bomb, they both thought. Or maybe the machine room had exploded, burning diesel fuel. Nothing else could explain the force they felt, one that seemed directly above them.
The elevators had rocked, swinging like pendulums. Pasquale Buzzelli, a Port Authority engineer going to his office on 64, felt the car right itself, then slowly descend to the 44th floor, where he had started from. Smoke began to pump through the shaft. No one seemed to understand what was happening, so he got back on the elevator, which now was working just fine, and rode up to the 64th floor. There he met his boss, Patrick Hoey, the engineer in charge of the Port Authority's bridges and tunnels, who was just as puzzled.
"What happened, Pat?" Buzzelli asked.
"I don't know, but it near knocked me out of my chair," Hoey replied.
The tower had miles of elevator shafts. In one that served the middle of the building, six men were in a car bound for the upper floors. They felt the jolt, then a swoop. A window washer named Jan Demczur punched the emergency stop button. In a moment, fingers of smoke crept into the car, rising past the cuffs of the men in the car, pushing down from the roof. They rang the intercom. No one answered. On board another elevator, which had just left the north tower lobby, was Judith Martin, the secretary who had lingered outside for a cigarette. She and six other people were now stuck, pressing the alarm and calling for help.
In the Marriott Hotel, tucked between the two towers, the Rev. Paul Engel, naked except for a cross dangling on a chain around his neck, had just gone to the lockers after working out when he heard an impossibly loud screech of metal on metal, like the squeal of train brakes. A Catholic priest, Engel went every morning to the health club atop the hotel. Normally, he finished his exercise with some laps in the pool, but had skipped that part of his routine today. Now he quickly pulled on the nearest garment, his swimming trunks, and peeked at the pool. It was on fire.
From a window on the 61st floor in the north tower, Ezra Aviles had seen everything. He knew it was no bomb. His window faced north, and he saw the plane tearing through the skies, heading straight for the tower. It had crashed into the building over his head--how far, he was not sure. In fact, its lower wing cut the ceiling of the 93rd floor, and its right wing had ripped across the 98th floor, at the very moment that Patricia Massari was speaking to her husband about her home pregnancy test.
Aviles worked for the Port Authority. He dialed five numbers, leaving identical messages, describing what he saw, and telling everyone up the chain of command to begin the evacuation. He called one colleague, John Paczkowski, but reached his voice mail. "It seems to be an American Airlines jetliner came in from the northern direction, toward--from the Empire State Building, toward us," Aviles said. He ticked through a list of notifications--he had called the police and the public affairs office, and had beeped the chief operating officer for the agency. "Smoke is beginning to come, so I think I'm gonna start bailing outta here, man ... . Don't come near the building if you're outside. Pieces are coming down, man. Bye."
Then he phoned his wife, Mildred, who was at home with two of their three children. "Millie, a plane hit the building," he said. "It's going to be on the news."
By then, the havoc was escalating, even if the cause was not apparent. In the police bureau at the base, Alan Reiss heard talk of a missile having been fired from the roof of the Woolworth Building, just a couple of blocks east of the trade center.
As Reiss was listening to this, a Port Authority detective, Richie Paugh, arrived.
"We're going out onto the plaza to let you know what's going on," Reiss told the desk. He and Paugh walked down the hallway from the plaza, past an airline ticket counter. A revolving door put them under a soffit, an overhang sheltering the entrance to 5 World Trade Center. They peered out. Debris had rained onto the plaza--steel and concrete and fragments of offices and glass. Above them, they could see the east side of the north tower, and also its northern face. Instead of the waffle gridding of the building's face, they now saw a wall of fire spread across ten or fifteen floors. Then they saw the people coming out the windows, driven toward air, and into air. The plane had struck not two minutes earlier.
On the ground, they saw an odd shape. Reiss looked closer. It was the nose gear of an airplane, missing the rubber tire, but with its wheel still connected to the hydraulic elbow that retracts into the bottom of the plane. Paugh began to take notes on its shape and location. Reiss protested. "There's crap falling on us," he said. "I don't have a hard hat on or anything, let's just drag it in."
He and Paugh lugged the part into the police office. "It's evidence, put a sticker on it," Reiss said.
"A plane hit the building," Paugh said.
"It's a big plane," Reiss added. "It's not a Piper Cub. This is a bi-i-i-g fucking wheel."
For hundreds of people on the upper floors of the north tower, death had come in a thunderous instant. The remains of one man who worked for Marsh & McLennan, which occupied space on the 93rd to 100th floors, would later be found five blocks from the tower. American Airlines Flight 11 had flown directly into the company's offices. The impact killed scores of people who could never have known what hit them.
Flight 11 had hit 1 World Trade Center, the north tower, at 450 miles an hour, having traveled the full length of Manhattan Island, fourteen miles from north to south, in less than two minutes. When it slammed into the north side of the building, the plane's forward motion came to a halt. The plane itself was fractionalized. Hunks of it erupted from the south side of the tower, opposite to where it had entered. A part of the landing gear landed five blocks south. The jet fuel ignited and roared across the sky, as if the fuel continued to fly on course, even without its jet. Much of the energy deflected from the speeding plane shot in waves down the skeleton of the north tower. The waves pulsed into the bedrock, rolled out to the Atlantic Ocean, and along the bed of the Hudson River. The impact registered on instruments in Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, twenty-two miles to the north, generating signals for twelve seconds. The earth shook.
Copyright © 2005 by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn Afterword copyright © 2006 by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn Postscript copyright © 2011 by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn All rights reserved.
Continues...
Excerpted from 102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer Copyright © 2011 by Jim Dwyer. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Times Books; Second Edition, New edition (August 2, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0805094210
- ISBN-13 : 978-0805094213
- Item Weight : 12.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.45 x 1 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #72,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #56 in Terrorism (Books)
- #659 in U.S. State & Local History
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So far it's a great book. I can tell this book was a great challenge to write and I am shocked it's not as thick as the Bible. It captures so many experiences as is, but you just know as you read it that it could only be 2% of all experiences in the tragedy. That is not to down play this book. It's truly an amazing feat to meld these stories together down to the very second of when it happened.
I'm about 5 chapters in and each chapter is going minute by minute from the first strike. So the first chapter is 8:46am, and the second chapter is 8:47am. (Prologue starts at 8:30am.) All of these people's experience in that ONE minute. There's a lot of jumping from person to person which was confusing at first, but once you stop trying to remember all the names you catch on to who is who.
I was expecting this book to be about only people who fought their way out and made it alive, because how could they have so much info down to the second of what they were doing if they weren't ever seen again? Well, they compiled all phone calls, messages and eye witnesses. This is the story of people who didn't make it out as much as people who did. Truly tragic.
Another thing I appreciate about this book is that it doesn't go into the conspiracy theories and politics surrounding 9/11. They left all the disputable crap out of the book which is probably the most respectful thing about this book. I know that some people will still dispute everything in the book, like it's just words on paper it means nothing. But this is rich with factual history when it was built and why everything happened as it did. It goes into the fire code that didn't exist when the towers were built to the window design made for fear of heights. It has maps and diagrams and photos which was really helpful. I actually wrote down a few key notes on my bookmark to keep an idea of the whole picture.
It doesn't quite "pull you into the building like you're there as a person" like some books do. I don't think that's at all possible in the first place. It explains the person's name, their career, a little back story, what floor they're on and who they're with in that minute. It does this with every person that comes into play. So it kinda jumps back and forth between Who They Are & What They Are Saying and Doing.
It's hard to explain what I'm trying to say. Like, you get sucked into the book in what they are doing (you can see it in your mind) and then brought back to earth when it goes to the next person.
I want to be sucked into the whole thing and I feel selfish and rude for saying that, but I just have to say it because I can see this being difficult to read for younger people or people who just don't like reading.
Youd almost have to be really interested in 9/11 to get into this book. I've done so much research on it and I wasn't directly affected by this event but I saw it like everyone else. Life moved on and one day I just wanted to look back on it. At that point I almost became obsessed with it. I say almost because it didn't consume my whole life but a big piece of it. I wasn't one of those people going into the conspiracy theories. I just wanted to know everything about it that was fact. I've watched every video, searched every transcript and one day I guess there was nothing left to see. Yet, I still to this day feel so empty about it. This book however is filling some of the emptiness. It's a whole new perspective on the event. In every minute there's what feels like years and years of experiences.
I think it's safe to say that the authors are respectful of the victims and don't go into dramatised morbid perspectives. One sentence that stuck out to me was when someone described what they heard on the other side of a wall... "yelling and commotion, but not panic". I could hear those noises in that sentence and it was people working together to get out. That was the goal. If the, "but not panic" wasn't there I probably would've heard yells of pain and anguish. I think most people think of one horrific picture of screaming and blood and crying. While that did exist, the buildings weren't filled with total panic, blood and anguish.
It was profound for me in that moment to understand the vast differences from floor to floor and even room to room. An entire company upstairs decided it was time to leave immediately, while downstairs there was no sense of urgency to leave the building.
I'm only 5 chapters in and I have felt feelings and thought things that I didn't before. It's a fresh look that leaves me feeling less sick about "what was it like"... We all know how the book ends and I think any human is left feeling empty after that. I just think that people need to attempt to understand the horror of being inside trapped or almost out of the building when it's too late. It's just that human empathy is so short when it comes to 9/11 so we try to grow it.
It's a great book and I almost want it to be in schools as a mandatory read.
This book is a sensitively and respectfully written account of what it would have been like inside the towers once they were hit. Every time a person was mentioned, I flipped the pages to the back section and scanned the "Lost" list of people in the North and South Towers, and list of firemens names. People you wanted to live did not, and other people you wanted to live, did.
The thing that stood out so amazingly, was the selflessness of the ordinary person. Others helping those who were struggling. For example, Stanley Primnath who witnessed the plane entering his floor and jamming the wing into the wall of his office. Then Brian Clark hearing his calls for help, helped Stanley all the way down to the ground floor and outside. Both were saved. Both are now lifelong friends. There is Josephine Harris who could not go on any longer and wanted to be left behind, but the firemen who were with her helped her down the stairs. Once the building started to collapse, they were trapped on the stairs, but survived and were pulled out of the rubble. Josephine Harris and her firemen became firm friends. There is Frank di Martini who selflessly scanned floor after floor looking for people, so he could tell them to leave the building. Sadly he did not make it out himself. The man in the red bandana who saved others but did not make it out. Someone in the book mentioned "choices". You must decide. You choose one way and there is a way out, you choose another way and there is no way out. You must make a choice.
The one thing I did find sad, but this problem is now rectified I believe, is the co-ordination between Police, Fire Department and other services.
Such a well written book. At once a eulogy for loved ones lost, and a testament to loved ones saved. An abundance of friendships found and kept. A stunning and completely heart breaking read.
Top reviews from other countries
"... simply to declare that the hijackers alone killed all those people gives them far more credit as tacticians than they are due. The buildings themselves became weapons... so, too, did a sclerotic emergency response culture in New York that resisted reform...
" At least 1,500 people in the trade centre - and possibly many more - survived the initial crashes but died because they were unable to escape from their floors or elevators whilst the buildings stood. Those people were not killed by the planes alone any more than passengers on the "Titanic" were killed by the iceberg. With 102 minutes in the north tower, and 57 minutes in the south, thousands of people had time to evacuate, and did. Those who did not escape were trapped by circumstances that had been the subject of debates that began before the first shovelful of earth was turned..."
The men who made decisions governed by financial profit rather than safety when the World Trade buildings were designed, emerge as the real villains of the drama. They reduced the number of escape routes so that they had more space to rent out. They used untried technologies that were never tested for their effectiveness in fire and heat. The terrorists may have been the final catalyst for the deaths on 9/11 but it was these money-grubbing faceless bureaucrats who were the real killers. We see how chances to improve safety were squandered after the 1993 bombing, how faults in communications between the Fire brigade and the Police were never overcome... We also discover how the role of civilians in the saving of lives was played down in order to cover up the squandering of firemen's lives.
This is a powerful book that unfolds the drama, the frustration, the tragedy and the sacrifice with the clinical precision of a scalpel. We watch the events unfold with the same horror we first saw them... but this time there are names attached to those who struggled for survival in the twin towers and we are in there with them, breathing in the fumes and feeling the heat... and fear. Individuals make decisions that lead to life or death, others are saved by coincidence and accident. If this was fiction would we believe it?