by James Glanz & Eric Lipton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2003
A confidence-shaker that deserves widespread discussion as a new WTC begins to take shape.
A remarkable biography—and autopsy—of the Twin Towers, controversial, like its subject, from start to finish.
The World Trade Center, according to New York Times science reporter Glanz and metro reporter Lipton, began as a brainstorm by a man once called “the P.T. Barnum of real estate,” William Zeckendorf, who had previously engineered the sale of a former Midtown slaughterhouse to erect the UN complex. That deal had effectively retired the only Midtown site large enough to accommodate a rival to the Rockefeller Center. When David Rockefeller, head of Chase National Bank, went looking for a building site to house his acquisition-swollen firm, he found that he had to stick close to Wall Street. The building he and Zeckendorf began planning in 1955 mutated, by 1961, into what a feasibility study called “A World Trade Center in the Port of New York.” Though at the start many Manhattanites opposed the costly project, by the time the WTC was completed in late 1970, the towers “shouldered their way into the affections of ordinary New Yorkers.” The WTC may have had a strange beauty, Glanz and Lipton write, but the construction was compromised in many ways by shortcuts taken to lighten the massive structure; whereas the Empire State Building, which survived a massive explosion when a B-25 bomber collided with it in 1945, was sheathed in brick and masonry that protected its girders and offered substantial fireproofing, the steel of the Twin Towers “was sprayed with a lightweight, foamy product . . . forming a fluffy coasting that would be hard-pressed even to stay in place—let alone give any fire protection—during a blast or impact or violent conflagration.” And that steel was so thin, the authors write, that when American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the north tower on September 11, 2001, “the light aluminum of the plane’s fuselage and wings simply entered the building almost without slowing down.” The implications seem clear: such shortcuts, made innocently enough in the interest of aesthetics and cost-effectiveness, condemned the WTC to fail and fall.
A confidence-shaker that deserves widespread discussion as a new WTC begins to take shape.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7428-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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