102 Minutes audiobook

Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn - images from the National Book Foundation 102 Minutes covers the time from the initial impact at World Trade Center #1, the North Tower, to its collapse 102 minutes later. The focus is on survivors, how people managed. In telling heroic tales of survival and sacrifice, Dwyer and Flynn offer much relevant information about how the city construction code was subverted to allow the Trade Center’s design. There were, for example, an insufficient number of stairways, insufficient and untested insulation, and placement of stairs in a way that had been vociferously opposed by the fire department. 102 Minutes was a National Book Award finalist. For anyone interested in the events of 9/11, this is definitely worth checking out.

While reading this book, I had a business trip to Boston. While at the Boston airport I took the following photo. The flag over gate B32 is one of the memorials at Boston’s Logan airport. This is the gate that the plane that hit the North Tower departed from:This book is fascinating but difficult to read. If you do not wish to relive the horrors of that day, this is not the book for you. You may also want to refrain from reading the quotes from inside the towers that I have included below. I know that this sort of content can be upsetting, but I do feel like keeping these words out there honors the memories of the victims. This book focuses on what happens inside the towers in the 102 minutes between the first plane hitting and the second of the two towers collapsing. There is also an intro and an epilogue featuring some of the leadup and some of the aftermath, but overall, the main idea of this book was to discuss the evacuation and rescue efforts in the towers – giving some first-hand testimony providing clarity and dispelling some myths. Definitely a gripping read.I leave you with some quotes from inside the towers. There are many more besides these, but this is just a sampling of the voices in the middle of tragedy. Again, maybe a bit hard to read, but important to remember!"Yeah, hi, I am on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center, which had an explosion," – Chris Hanley - Windows on the World restaurant"We are getting no direction up here! We need direction as to where we need to direct our guests and our employees as soon as possible." - Christine Olender, the assistant manager of the Windows on the World restaurant“Hey Mom. I’m sure you’ve heard a plane crashed into World Trade Center One. I’m obviously alive and well but obviously pretty scared. Saw a guy fall out of probably the 91st storey all the way down. You’re welcome to give a call. Love you.” Brad Fetchet, Floor 89 – South Tower“A plane crashed into the Trade Center. It’s on fire, and I’m in it, and I can’t breathe. Tell everyone I love them, and if I don’t get out... goodbye.” Brian Nunez, Floor 104 – North Tower“Numerous civilians in all stairwells, numerous burn victims are coming down. We’re trying to send them down first . . . We’re still heading up” Captain Patrick Brown – North Tower

OhMy GoodnessI would put a spoiler alert on this, except that everyone already knows how this story ends. I almost didn't make it through the book. I originally started reading it because of the technical explanations it had for all the things I never understood fully: the lack of communications, the faulty design of emergency exits in the towers, the layout of the buildings, the timing of the events, and so forth. However, the personal stories of the people involved are interspersed throughout the explanations. Information derived from 911 and family phone calls were pieced together to get a partial picture of what happened to individuals in the two towers before they went down. Warning: This is very, very disturbing. It tries to stay as practical as possible, and doesn't delve into over-dramatizations...however, you are reading along about what is happening with a certain person, and all of the sudden you are seeing the story from another person's point of view. And then you realize it is because the other person is now gone. A real person, someone who really experienced this event. And their narration ends, just like that.I spent a lot of time crying, and I really don't recommend this read to you if you don't have closure yet, or if you don't care to know the technical details of the terrorist attack. I'm not sure it was worth it for me, either.

7 years after the event, I finally dug within myself to find the courage to read this book. I don't think I WANTED to know what happened inside The Towers...it was just TOO close. I was right about that...I didn't want to know. And yet the tying together of this multitude of perspectives to provide a clear picture of the events of those most devastating 102 minutes in our nation's history was done so skillfully as to present an incredibly clear picture of the events. That being said, I can't say how it would appear to someone unfamiliar with the World Trade Center itself. I can't speak to the images created for someone with no idea of the physical structure and layout of the Twin Towers. Still, I doubt that the intensity and terror of the day would be lost on any reader. 7 years later and I hope for all the survivors that the days are a little more peaceful and the nights a little more restful. And may all the readers learn from this book the importance of taking time each day to express themselves to those they love, so nothing is left a question on their final day.

This was an absolutely amazing book. Not just because of the true-life accounts of many who survived (or, in many cases, didn't), but mostly because the authors pull no punches in telling the story of 9/11/01.This isn't a book that bashes the government, both local and national, but it does tell both the good and the bad, the positive and the negative. While I was uplifted and encouraged by so many examples of human kindness, I was devastated to read that so very many deaths could have possibly been avoided, if there had just been better communication between political-minded departments.Also, the fact that so many shortcuts were taken in building the World Trade Center, simply to create more rentable space, shows just how far people will go to make a buck. It saddens me that so many lives might have been saved if there were more staircases, if they had been spread out more, if they had had proper fireproofing.If you're interested at all in the story that is 9/11, then this is a must-read.

I happened upon this read browsing in the history section for another book. I didn’t have a particular one in mind, just wanted to mix up my reading a bit. I had two others in hand when I saw this one haphazardly shoved into a spot on the shelf and I knew instantly that I had found my next read. This book is exactly what you think it's about. It’s straight and to the point and it lays out all of the detailed information in a very organized format. I have nothing negative to say about this book and recommend it to anyone that wants to know more. Sorry for keeping it brief, but I don’t feel this is a review where my personal views and reactions to the topic are needed.

As someone with few memories before the date 9/11/2001, it had always been difficult for me to understand, on more than an intellectual level, the importance of that terrorist attack. That two planes hit the World Trade Center seemed as inevitable as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Indeed, considering the innumerable number of tragedies happening around the world, at any given time, it was not obvious to me why this particular tragedy was so decisive.I only really understood, on a visceral level, when I finally paid a visit to the museum at Ground Zero. It was a gut-wrenching experience. The exhibit presents the attacks in a timeline, charting the events minute by minute, second by second. Each moment is accompanied by text, audio, and video, making for a kind of total immersion. By the end, I felt the confusion, the terror, and the desperation in my bones, and I have never again wondered why this particular tragedy was so decisive.The highest praise I can give this book is that it is the closest approximation to visiting the museum that exists in textual form. The authors effectively do what the museum does: weave the individual stories of victims and survivors into a narrative that recaptures the chaos of the event as it unfolded. The research is stellar and the writing is gripping and eloquent.But the authors do more than just narrate a tragedy. Briefly, but convincingly, they explain why the attack was so deadly. It starts with the design of the twin towers themselves.They were designed in the late 1960s, shortly after the city’s building codes had been revamped. In the wake of earlier tragedies—most notably, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which occurred just a few blocks from the towers—the city had imposed stringent fire-safety standards: requiring buildings to use masonry, to have a certain number of stairwells, and to space the stairwells apart.The new building code relaxed all of these measures. As a result, the twin towers had only three stairwells per tower, unprotected by masonry, and all concentrated in the middle of the building—thus making it easy for a single disaster to impede all three at once. Furthermore, the steel beams that held up the structure were protected by a coating of spray-on fireproofing material, whose efficacy was untested. Thus, when the planes hit the building, they cut through all of the stairwells (except for one on the south tower), and the resultant fire melted the exposed steel.This is not the only shortcoming highlighted by the authors. They also show how a lack of cooperation between the emergency services cost lives. The police, for example, had several helicopters in the air, which gave them advanced warning of the buildings’ collapses. But as they used different radio channels from the fire department, none of this information was available to the firefighters. Indeed, many the firefighters in the north tower remained unaware that the south tower had collapsed, and thus failed to promptly evacuate the other building. What is more, the 911 operators (poorly paid employees of the police department) had little ability to gather real-time information, and thus could offer only generic advice to callers. As a result, many people in upper floors of the south tower were advised to stay put, when there was still an intact stairwell in the building.This story of myopic building codes and outdated emergency protocols complements the story of inter-departmental distrust that crippled the FBI’s and the CIA’s pursuit of Al-Qaeda, and the story of balkanized air-traffic control that made it difficult to track the hijacked planes or defend against them (Dick Cheney’s shootdown order was, for example, never transmitted to the pilots). One realizes that the terrorists, through a combination of cunning and luck, managed to hit upon a collective blind spot, where the shortcomings of many layers of government coincided—from airport security to architectural codes. Standing over and against the many examples of official incompetence that came into play that day are the many examples of individual heroism. These pages are full of ordinary people doing their best to help one another in horrifying circumstances. Their bravery and selflessness provided a stark contrast to the wickedness of the attackers and the myopia of the would-be defenders.

Being a) British and b) just a year old when 9/11 happened, it had always seemed sort of abstract to me. Like yes, of course I know it unleashed the War on Terror and set up all the stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know it's why airport security is so tight, and US border officials so careful. But until I read this book, I don't think I'd really grasped that almost 3000 people died in the middle of one of the world's most iconic cities, in such an awful and devastating way. I'm shocked at the fact that, even though I spent several summers in Manhattan as a teenager when my dad lived there, I never once thought of visiting the 9/11 museum.This book tells the story of some of the people who were inside the Twin Towers when they were struck. It's not incredibly descriptive - I didn't necessarily feel like I was there - but it's written in a tight, spare style which keeps you hooked all the way through.I'm visiting New York this summer, and this time I definitely don't plan to let a visit to the museum pass me by.

I read this in commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11. This book was absolutely gut wrenching. It fact it was so emotionally draining that I had to put it down at times to take a breath and remind myself that I was not trapped in a smokey tower, almost two thousand feet off the ground with no means of escape. As I read it felt like I was traveling through the towers as I spent the last moments of people lives with them. What I take away from this book was no matter how evil the terrorists were and how destructive their act, it was overcome with pure goodness in thousands of ways and by thousands of people. Frank DiMartini and his group were directly responsible for saving 70 people before ultimately losing his life. He could have left the tower with his wife but he kept going up to the impact zone in order to save whoever he could. Abe Zelmanowitz wouldn't leave his paraplegic friend Ed Beyea even though he could have evacuated and saved his own life. Orio Palmer, a firefighter who arrived at the South Tower, fixed an elevator to take him to the 41st floor sky lobby and from there ran up 37 flights of stairs to go into the impact zone. Once there he gave comfort to survivors and directed them to escape routes. Countless first responders who stayed with people they were helping to evacuate even when the news finally came that the towers were in danger of falling. An act of evil on a terrible day overcome with heroism and love, that is what I take away from 9/11.

I'm not sure this book is a substitute for the official 9/11 report, but it does have a dignity all its own. The one-hundred-two minutes referred to are the time between the first plane struck the first of the giant WTC Twin Towers in lower Manhattan on 9-11-2001, and both towers had collapsed. This focus here is as much on institutional fail as individual bravery; pay attention to the actions that political figures, some of them still prominent today, took before and after the disaster. The kind of "inverted pyramid" prose with its short choppy sentences that the authors frequently resort to is more suited to the daily papers they came from than a serious work of history. Still, well worth reading. Interrelationship of details is excellent, and charts and maps outstanding.Through an accident my prior review of August 24, 2018 was deleted, hence this new posting.

It was just another Tuesday morning. I was just rolling out of bed after sleeping in. I made my way to the tv in the living room before i got myself a bowl of cereal. The today show was just coming back from commercial break and I heard Katie Couric's voice saying that what was being displayed on the tv screen was a live shot of what appears to be a small aircraft had just hit one of the Twin Towers.I looked and stopped pouring my breakfast out. I sat on the sofa and was looking at smoke pouring out of the tower along with burts of fire. I watched for the next few minutes and then grabbed the phone next to me to call my then boyfriend who was a volunteer fire chief/paramedic in our county in New Jersey. He answered and I said he was missing the action in NYC right now as a plane had hit one of the twin towers. He said he was on his way home from a call right that very moment.I continued to watch the tv news and then I heard his truck pull up. At the same exact time I was watching, live on tv the SECOND plane to hit the other twin tower. I just froze. How could the pilot not see the smoke or the tower it's self. Was there something wrong with the flight routes or something. Surely something had to be wrong. Then my boyfriend came walking in and took one look at my face, glued to the tv and he walked over and said "Jesus Christ!" He sat down. We watched for a few more minutes and then he said what some of the reporters where saying on tv. "We're going to WAR over this!"That was just shy of ten years ago. I came across this book in the library and decided I would give it a look over, since it was coming up on the 10th anniversary. This book gave me chills, goosebumps and a sleepless night. Ever since watching the events of 9/11 live on the tv, I can't look at a picture of the Twin Towers with out shivering. This book is very powerful and moving. A must read to anyone wanting more information or just to see what it really was like.