Synopses & Reviews
The definitive biography of the iconic skyscrapers and the ambitions that shaped them-from their dizzying rise to their unforgettable fall
More than a year after the nation began mourning the lives lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center, it became clear that something else was being mourned: the towers themselves. They were the biggest and brashest icons that New York, and possibly America, has ever produced-magnificent giants that became intimately familiar around the globe. Their builders were possessed of a singular determination to create wonders of capitalism as well as engineering, refusing to admit defeat before natural forces, economics, or politics.
No one knows the history of the towers better than New York Times reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton. In a vivid, brilliantly researched narrative, the authors re-create David Rockefeller's ambition to rebuild lower Manhattan, the spirited opposition of local storeowners and powerful politicians, the bold structural innovations that later determined who lived and died, master builder Guy Tozzoli's last desperate view of the towers on September 11, and the charged and chaotic recovery that could have unraveled the secrets of the buildings' collapse but instead has left some enduring mysteries.
Like David McCullough's The Great Bridge, City in the Sky is a riveting story of New York City itself, of architectural daring, human frailty, and a lost American icon.
Review
"[A] magnificent book." -
The New Republic
"James Glanz and Eric Lipton's brilliantly reported and profoundly moving but admirably clear-eyed account of the accidental conception, long gestation, difficult birth, brief life and tragic death of the World Trade Center is likely to remain a classic."
-The New York Times
Synopsis
"A fascinating story . . . Those who delighted in Caro's Power Broker will relish City in the Sky." -Thomas Bender, The New York Times Book Review
The World Trade Center was the biggest and brashest icon that New York has ever produced-a pair of magnificent giants that became intimately familiar around the globe.
In this vivid, brilliantly researched narrative, New York Times reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton re-create the life of the World Trade Center from its genesis in David Rockefeller's ambition to rebuild lower Manhattan to the spirited battles with local storeowners and powerful politicians who opposed it, to the bold structural engineering innovations that would later determine who lived and died in its collapse. And like David McCullough's The Great Bridge, City in the Sky is a riveting story of New York itself- of architectural daring, political maneuvering, human ambition and frailty, and a lost American icon.
About the Author
James Glanz is a science reporter for
The New York Times and has a doctorate in physics from Princeton University.
Eric Lipton is a metropolitan reporter for the Times and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1992. Since September 11, 2001, they have investigated the attack on the World Trade Center and the aftermath. They both live in New York City.