102 Minutes

Description

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 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 the 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 volces to go inside the infernos seeing cataclysm and herosim one person at a time, Dwyer and Flynn tell the affecting, authoratative 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.

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.

"A heart-stopping, meticulous account ... a fitting tribute to the people caught up in one of the great dramas of our time ... a cathartic release" New York Times "Heartbreaking and inspiring" Boston Herald "With its tragic and preordained conclusion, the book becomes a tearjerker in the most essential way" Entertainment Weekly "Writing in a way that confers dignity on each subject ... This is one book that will stay with readers for a long time" People "Insightful, compassionate and unrelievedley tense" Baltimore Sun