Book details

City in the Sky

The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center

Author: James Glanz and Eric Lipton

City in the Sky

City in the Sky

$11.99

e-Book

About This Book

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...

Page Count
448
Genre
On Sale
01/21/2014

Book Details

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.

City in the Sky is a riveting story of New York City itself, of architectural daring, human frailty, and a lost American icon.

Imprint Publisher

Times Books

ISBN

9781466863071

In The News

"[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

"In this lively page-turner, intensively researched and meticulously documented, a world of international trade, business history, litigation, architecture, engineering and forensics comes clear—a political and financial melodrama with more wheeling and dealing than Dallas, touched lightly with the comedic and haunted by tragedy. ... This book may be the definitive popular account of the towers." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A remarkable biography—and autopsy—of the Twin Towers, controversial, like its subject, from start to finish." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The authors' highly detailed yet always human and dramatic chronicling of the towers' unprecedented construction, as well as unique insights into how the controversial twin towers finally won the affection of skeptical New Yorkers only to come under siege...is both fascinating and tragic, encompassing, as it does, the best and worst of human ingenuity." —Booklist (starred review)

About the Creators

City in the Sky

City in the Sky

$11.99

e-Book