Stories of creation and destruction told in an informed and compassionate voice.
A detailed, inspiring, and horrifying account of the restaurant that sat atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Former Premiere senior editor Roston (I Lost It at the Video Store: A Filmmakers' Oral History of a Vanished Era, 2015) returns with a rich, complex account of Windows on the World, a story the author begins by discussing the many immigrants who worked there—later, he includes one of Donald Trump’s many clueless comments about 9/11. However, politics is much in the background; in the foreground are the many stories of the founders of the restaurant, the local politics (e.g., dealing with the Port Authority, the organization that controlled the site), key workers in the restaurant, the amenities, and the menus. He also chronicles the fundamental changes that occurred after the Feb. 26, 1993, truck-bomb episode. Informed by more than 125 interviews, the text is most impressive for its accounts of the human relationships involved, both the friendships and the fiery competitions among some of the managers. Emerging above all is Joe Baum, the restaurateur, who, writes Roston, “could electrify or freeze a room, depending on his mood.” Baum and his colleagues faced significant challenges in the space. For example, they were not allowed to use natural gas and had to use electricity (which most all disdained) and a charcoal pit, and they were dealing with a rough economy in the mid-1970s. Eventually, however, the restaurant grossed enormous sums and became a New York City institution. Roston concludes with some very painful chapters about 9/11: the day before, the day of, the days after. All who were in the restaurant died that day; there was no escape from the floors above the impact. As the author grimly reminds us, many on the doomed upper floors jumped, preferring that to incineration.
Stories of creation and destruction told in an informed and compassionate voice.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3799-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
