A moving, deeply felt tribute to a courageous individual who sacrificed his life to save others.
The inspirational story of a modern-day hero who escorted dozens to safety during the 9/11 attacks.
Longtime ESPN correspondent Rinaldi reconstructs the life of Welles Crowther, a fearless man responsible for saving the lives of dozens on 9/11. Already determined and passionate as a youth, Crowther grew up in a family of faith in Nyack, New York, raised by loving parents whose first date ironically occurred on Sept. 11, 1968. A competitive boy, he excelled in sports and joined his father in volunteering at the local firehouse. A lasting boyhood keepsake was a red bandanna given to him by his father; this “unexpected gift” became a prized possession and a “superhero” lucky charm to Crowther. He attended Boston College, excelled at lacrosse, and, after graduating, realized his dream of living in New York City and began working as an equities trader on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower, though he had future aspirations to formally become a firefighter. In the frantic minutes following the first plane’s impact on 9/11, Crowther took to the stairwells searching for survivors and encountered a crowd of injured people whom he managed to rescue, even carrying one on his back as he descended a stairway. Rinaldi incorporates many survivor accounts of those who later told the media of a mysterious man with his face covered with a red handkerchief who saved them only to ascend back into the building looking for others. Crowther perished as the tower collapsed after aiding the fire department as a civilian usher, yet his heroic legacy, lauded by President Barack Obama, is eternally memorialized at the 9/11 tribute site. With dramatic, only occasionally maudlin prose, Rinaldi captures the compelling urgency of the indelible event and fondly tips his hat to Crowther, an exemplary embodiment of human compassion and selflessness.
A moving, deeply felt tribute to a courageous individual who sacrificed his life to save others.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-677-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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