Synopses & Reviews
Searing, poignant, and utterly compelling102 Minutes does for the September 11 catastrophe what Walter Lord did for the Titanic in his masterpiece, A Night to Remember.” Rick Atkinson,
author of In the Company of Soldiers and An Army at Dawn
At 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews with rescuers and survivors, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts, New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn tell the story of September 11 from the inside looking out, weaving together the stories of ordinary men and women into an epic account of struggle, determination, and grace. Hailed immediately upon its hardcover publication as the definitive account of that terrible morning, 102 Minutes now contains a new Afterword that incorporates powerful firsthand material, including tapes and documents, that Dwyer and Flynn recently obtained after more than three years of litigation with the city of New York.
Eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and translated into a dozen languages, 102 Minutes is a gripping narrative that is also investigative reporting of the first rankin a class by itself,” according to Readers Digest. Dwyer and Flynn reveal the decisions, both good and bad, that proved to be the difference between life and death on a day that changed America forever.
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 coauthor of Two Seconds Under the World, an account of the 1993 effort to knock down the World Trade Center, 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 editor at the Times, was the newspaper's police bureau chief on September 11. He previously worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News, New York Newsday, and the Stamford Advocate. National Book Award FinalistA New York Times Notable BookA Kirkus Best Book of the Year At 8:46 A.M. on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towersreading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived ituntil now.
Of the millions of words written about this wrenching day, most have been from the outside looking in. New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have taken the oppositeand far more revealingapproach. Reported solely from the perspective of the people inside the towers, 102 Minutes is the epic account of ordinary men and women who saved themselves and others. Among them:
The construction manager and his colleagues, who pried open doors and freed dozens of people trapped high in the north tower.
The police officer who was a few blocks away, filing his retirement papers, but grabbed back his badge and sprinted to the buildings.
The window washer stuck in an elevator fifty floors up with five other men, who used a squeegee to escape.
The secretaries who led an elderly man down eighty-nine flights, and the young executives who carried a disabled woman from the 68th floor.
The fire chief (and marathoner) who was the first rescuer to reach the injured and the trapped on the 78th floor of the south tower, after a grueling dash up the stairs wearing fifty pounds of gear.
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.
From hundreds of interviews with rescuers and survivors, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts, Dwyer and Flynn have assembled a gripping narrative that is also investigative reporting of the first rank. They show that even as so many peopleuniformed officers and civilians alikeresponded with great valor, they did so in a context of inadequate building safety and tragic flaws in New York's emergency preparedness.
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 womenthe 12,000 who escaped and the 2,749 who perishedas they made 102 minutes count as never before.
"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 . . . With its clear prose, 102 Minutes does an admirable job of demonstrating that, in many ways, the most effective first responders on Sept. 11 were not police officers or firefighters but civilians. Their stories are well-told, stirring, and heart-breaking . . . This emphasis on the civilians in no way detracts from the heroism of the professional first responders. Their gallantry is movingly described, as is their indispensable role in ensuring calm in the stairwells, assisting the injured, and guiding the evacuees on the lower floors."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
"A masterpiece of reporting . . . Succinct . . . Riveting enough to be read in a sitting . . . Heart-wrenching . . . Brilliant and troubling."Kevin Baker, The New York Times
"Poignant, emotion-stirring, and important . . . A story of how ordinary people exhibit extraordinary traits in times of peril."Tom Walker, The Denver Post
"It took the authors three years to describe what happened in 102 Minutes . . . The book is worth the wait."Ingrid Ahlgren, The Providence Journal
"The writingsometimes searing, sometimes factual but always appropriatebrings the human experience of disaster into focus."Rosemary Herbert, Boston Herald
"Many of the stories are astounding; almost all are heart-breaking . . . They accord these men and women the honor they deserve."Brian Palmer, Newsday
"102 Minutes does for the September 11 catastrophe at New York's World Trade Center what Walter Lord did for the Titanic in his masterpiece, A Night to Remember. Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have written a book that is searing, poignant, and utterly compelling."Rick Atkinson, author of An Army at Dawn
"This is a heart-stopping, heart-breaking book. It is an infuriating one. Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn give us vivid examples of uncommon valor in the face of approaching doom. Nobody can read those pages without feeling a chilly surge of fear. But they also give usin lucid, understated proseexplanations for the immensity of the calamity. In short, this is an essential document about New York's worst human tragedy. And it's a terrific book."Peter Hamill, author of Downtown: My Manhattan
"For those of us haunted by the tragedy, an indispensable book."O magazine"A powerful account of the disaster that hesitates neither to confer laurels nor point fingers . . . [Dwyer and Flynn] celebrate the extraordinary capacities of ordinary folk. Swift, photographic prose defines the dimensions of helland of humanity."Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Drawn from thousands of radio transcripts, phone messages, e-mails and interviews with eyewitnesses, this 9/11 account comes from the perspective of those inside the World Trade Center from the moment the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m. to the collapse of the north tower at 10:28 a.m. The stories are intensely intimate, and they often stir gut-wrenching emotions. A law firm receptionist quietly eats yogurt at her desk seconds before impact. Injured survivors, sidestepping debris and bodies, struggle down a stairwell. A man trapped on the 88th floor leaves a phone message for his fiancée: 'Kris, there's been an explosion . . . I want you to know my life has been so much better and richer because you were in it.' Dwyer and Flynn, New York Times writers, take rescue agencies to task for rampant communications glitches and argue that the towers' faulty design helped doom those above the affected floors ('Their fate had been sealed nearly four decades earlier, when . . . fire stairs were eliminated as a wasteful use of valuable space'). In doing so, the authors frequently draw parallels to similar safety oversights aboard the ill-fated Titanic nearly 90 years before. Their reporting skills are exceptional; readers experience the chaos and confusion that unfolded inside, in grim, painstaking detail."Publishers Weekly
Review
"In this heart-stopping, meticulous account of the minutes between the first plane crash and the collapse of the north tower, [Dwyer and Flynn] unflinchingly place the reader in the minds and hearts of the people who actually confronted our worst fears." James B. Stewart, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"[U]nsparing, eloquent....With its consistently clear prose, 102 Minutes does an admirable job of conveying this chaos without replicating it." The Washington Post
Review
"[An] artful compilation...[that] provides several contexts for the horrendous things that came to pass...[and] brings the human experience of disaster into focus." Boston Herald
Review
"Flynn and Dwyer...celebrate the extraordinary capacities of ordinary folk. Swift, photographic prose defines the dimensions of hell and of humanity." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"It took the authors three years to describe what happened in 102 minutes....The book is worth the wait." Providence Journal
Review
"[I]t's the individual stories of what was happening inside the towers...that pack a powerful emotional punch....[A] poignant, emotion-stirring and important book, though not an easy read at times." Denver Post
Review
"[A] masterpiece of reporting....[A] remarkably comprehensive account....[A] brilliant and troubling book..." Kevin Baker, The New York Times
Review
"Harrowing, deeply reported....Insightful, compassionate, and unrelievedly tense, 102 Minutes creates a hellishness we once thought could exist only in places like Dresden and Stalingrad, never here, never in Manhattan." Baltimore Sun
Review
"A can't-put-down account....Although well constructed, the book would have benefited from a good editing to sharpen and clarify certain passages. The human stories are so compelling, however, that few readers will notice." San Antonio Express-News
Synopsis
"Searing, poignant, and utterly compelling—102 Minutes does for the September 11 catastrophe what Walter Lord did for the Titanic in his masterpiece, A Night to Remember."—Rick Atkinson, author of
In the Company of Soldiers and
An Army at DawnAt 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews with rescuers and survivors, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts, New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn tell the story of September 11 from the inside looking out, weaving together the stories of ordinary men and women into an epic account of struggle, determination, and grace. Hailed immediately upon its hardcover publication as the definitive account of that terrible morning, 102 Minutes now contains a new Afterword that incorporates powerful firsthand material, including tapes and documents, that Dwyer and Flynn recently obtained after more than three years of litigation with the city of New York.
Eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and translated into a dozen languages, 102 Minutes is a gripping narrative that is also investigative reporting of the first rank—"in a class by itself," according to Reader's Digest. Dwyer and Flynn reveal the decisions, both good and bad, that proved to be the difference between life and death on a day that changed America forever.
Synopsis
The dramatic and moving account of the struggle for life inside the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, when every minute countedAt 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers-reading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it-until now.
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 have taken the opposite-and far more revealing-approach. Reported from the perspectives of those inside the towers, 102 Minutes captures the little-known stories of ordinary people who took extraordinary steps to save themselves and others. Beyond this stirring panorama stands investigative reporting of the first rank. An astounding number of people actually survived the plane impacts but were unable to escape, and the authors raise hard questions about building safety and tragic flaws in New York's emergency preparedness.
Dwyer and Flynn rely on hundreds of interviews with rescuers, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts. They cross a bridge of voices to go inside the infernos, seeing cataclysm and heroism, one person at a time, to tell the affecting, authoritative saga of the men and women-the nearly 12,000 who escaped and the 2,749 who perished-as they made 102 minutes count as never before. 102 Minutes is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
About the Author
Jim Dwyer and
Kevin Flynn, native New Yorkers and veteran newspaper reporters, work at
The New York Times. Dwyer is co-author of
Two Seconds Under the World, an account of the 1993 effort to knock down the World Trade Center, 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 editor at the
Times, was the newspaper's police bureau chief on September 11. He previously worked as a reporter for the
Daily News,
Newsday, and
The Advocate (Stamford).