A heartfelt, affecting book that sheds new light on one of the darkest moments in recent history.
A former assistant chief of the New York City Fire Department delivers a firsthand account of the terrible events of 9/11.
Pfeifer opens at a firehouse on Duane Street, where two young French filmmakers were shooting footage for a documentary tracing the making of a firefighter in the training of a young recruit. All that was needed was a fire. Pfeifer and the crew got far more than they bargained for when they watched the first hijacked plane crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. “As the closest chief in lower Manhattan,” writes the author, “I knew instantly I was going to be the first chief on the scene and would have to take command.” Upon arrival, he had to make difficult decisions: It would take firefighters 60 minutes to reach the 93rd floor, where the fire was raging. Meanwhile, the building was already beginning to teeter, finally requiring Pfeifer to go against the ingrained culture of the FDNY and withdraw his crews from the building and leave the area before the towers fell. That process was completed just before 10:28 a.m., when, as Pfeifer writes, “For the first time, I realized that both towers had completely collapsed. The buildings were not hiding behind the smoke. They no longer existed.” In the aftermath, Pfeifer—all of whose company survived, even though 343 firefighters, including his brother, would not—analyzed failures of communication that kept firefighters and police from coordinating their efforts, which he would see through to a thoroughgoing reform that paid off when US Airways 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson River in 2009. He also pioneered cross-agency counterterrorism efforts. “The heart of crisis leadership is the ability to sustain hope by unifying efforts to solve complex problems in the face of great tragedy,” he writes, and this account shows the great strides forward that he helped engineer after just such a tragedy.
A heartfelt, affecting book that sheds new light on one of the darkest moments in recent history.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-33025-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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