Life At Ground Zero

The instant #1 New York Times bestseller. In time for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, master storyteller Alan Gratz (Refugee) delivers a pulse-pounding and unforgettable take on history and hope, revenge and fear -- and the stunning links between the past and present. September 11, 2001, New York City: Brandon is visiting his dad at work, on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. Out of nowhere, an airplane slams into the tower, creating a fiery nightmare of terror and confusion. And Brandon is in the middle of it all. Can he survive -- and escape? September 11, 2019, Afghanistan: Reshmina has grown up in the shadow of war, but she dreams of peace and progress. When a battle erupts in her village, Reshmina stumbles upon a wounded American soldier named Taz. Should she help Taz -- and put herself and her family in mortal danger? Two kids. One devastating day. Nothing will ever be the same.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001, forever altered the American landscape, both figuratively and literally. Immediately after the jets struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center, Dennis Smith, a former firefighter, reported to Manhattan’s Ladder Co. 16 to volunteer in the rescue efforts. In the weeks that followed, Smith was present on the front lines, attending to the wounded, sifting through the wreckage, and mourning with New York’s devastated fire and police departments. This is Smith’s vivid account of the rescue efforts by the fire and police departments and emergency medical teams as they rushed to face a disaster that would claim thousands of lives. Smith takes readers inside the minds and lives of the rescuers at Ground Zero as he shares stories about these heroic individuals and the effect their loss had on their families and their companies. “It is,” says Smith, “the real and living history of the worst day in America since Pearl Harbor.” Written with drama and urgency, Report from Ground Zero honors the men and women who—in America’s darkest hours—redefined our understanding of courage.

Where are you? Life is uncertain. Skyscrapers crash and so do stock markets. Bodies get broken, and so do relationships. Our health declines and marriages fail. Ground Zero brings us to places where we see how little is in our control, and how God still gives people a second chance to bounce back in life.

A Second Chance at LifeOn the sunny morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, terrorists murdered more than twenty-seven hundred people in an attack on New York City.Thousands died when a hijacked Boeing 767 slammed into Tower One of the World Trade Center.It was first blood. For Leslie Haskin, it was a second chance at life.This is the riveting account of Leslie's harrowing escape--down 36 floors in a doomed and dying building and away from a life focused on perks, prestige, and power. The intervening months brought crippling mental and emotional distress, but from the rubble and ashes, the corporate climber rediscovered the faith of her childhood and now embraces a new life of serving others.

Very quietly Ron said, “You know, I think the Towers are going to go. Maybe we’d better get out of here.” ßWe suddenly realized that if either of the Towers fell at a certain angle, our building was directly in the line of fall. Above the raging flames, the perpendicular steel I-beams were beginning to bulge out, softening in the heat. Again his unnaturally quiet voice, “I can’t stay here. If the Towers fall on us, I’ll die of fright.” (BALCONY VIEW - a 9/11/ Diary ) Julia Frey’s account begins on September 11, 2001, as the couple decide that despite her husband’s illness, they must somehow flee. They abandon his wheelchair; he is too frail to climb on a boat. Later that day, covered with ashes, they struggle home through a neighborhood pitched into destruction and chaos, to look out his study window at their new view: “the stage set for Dante’s Inferno.” The domino effect of one burning, collapsing building setting fire to the next one makes it clear that their own building could still go. “The electricity was out. Ron could never go down 26 flights on his rear end. We were trapped in the sky.” That’s when Julia decides to write it all down -- if only for the people who will find their bodies. Describing the first night in the the ruins, being evacuated, then returning weeks later, to live at Ground Zero, she discovers that their world has totally changed, yet finally not changed at all. “Our previous problems didn’t magically disappear. They were just waiting for us to come back in the door.” This powerful narrative of double coping -- with Ron’s progressing disability and with the after-effects of 9/11 -- describes a situation the manuals don’t cover -- caregiving in a disaster. Julia Frey’s intense, wryly humorous ‘you are there’ style buoys up the diary and moves it swiftly along, catching us in a gripping, touching, brave, tender, funny story of falling towers, a failing husband and a floundering ménage à trois. “Nothing happens in a vacuum,” she says, weaving in the leitmotif of a long-term love affair. Unflinchingly, she faces the ruins out the window and her own disturbing ambivalence as she sacrifices her creative and professional life to become a full-time caregiver. Ron is no angel, either. He’s a self-centered, willful novelist who after convincing her to take a lover, now wants her to give him up. “What makes him think he can turn us off and on like televisions?” she wonders. Ron’s own writing creates an important counterpoint to Julia’s voice, as she weaves into her diary quotations from his posthumous novel, Last Fall (FC2, 2005). In a poignant Coda, another tale comes to light -- the almost supernatural coincidences between Ron’s last short story and a series of events that occur after Ron dies. There is even a happy ending. Now, twenty years later, Julia's experience is no longer an extraordinary occurrence. This historical diary is important not only to historians, sociologists and psychologists helping patients recover from PTSD, but above all, to those who find themselves unexpectedly plunged into similar catastophic situations: becoming caregivers during a major emergency. The international Covid-19 pandemic and regional climate-change disasters like wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, repeated Gulf Coast flooding and the 2021 Texas freezes have left many unprepared peopleto deal with a very ill family member, without electricity, gas or clean water. Julia's dilemma unfortunately is no longer rare. Many people will find it comforting to know that even unheroic people manage to get through such times. Book Review: “An intimate memoir of love and loss in the shadow of 9/11 (...) Engaging and candid; an insightful look at how one woman copes with personal and national trauma.” -- Kirkus Indie

LIFE Magazine photographer Joe McNally presents 150 photographs taken with his one-of-a-kind camera, a 12-foot by 12-foot high Polaroid which takes pictures 40 inches wide by 80 inches tall - larger than life-size. The series presents the (mostly) anonymous heroes of Ground Zero.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans came together in a way not seen for a generation, pledging unity to rebuild after the horrific loss of the Twin Towers. People were signing up to go to war; rescue workers were laboring to clear rubble. But instead of becoming a rallying symbol in the fight against terrorism, Ground Zero has been plagued by intense conflict and controversy from the very start. Battle for Ground Zero goes behind the scenes of this fight to rebuild, revealing how grieving families, commercial interests, and politicking bureaucrats clashed at every step of the way, confounding progress and infuriating the public. Since the fall of 2001, author Elizabeth Greenspan has been documenting the drama—conducting interviews with neighborhood residents, architects, officials, rescue workers, and victims' relatives, as well as key New York players like uber-developer Larry Silverstein, and Governor Pataki. Here she provides a warts-and-all look at this pivotal decade—from the bitter feuding between city officials and victims' families, to the endless controversy over the memorial design, to the fraught tenth anniversary, against a still-unfinished building. Battle for Ground Zero is an exhaustively researched reminder of how long it took to put a brave face on the horror of 9/11.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, everyone in New York--and the world, for that matter--was deeply affected. This was magnified trememdously for those living near the World Trade Center. Author Michael Cook lived in the closest residential structure to Ground Zero, and this is his survivor's story: what it took to clear out tons of toxic debris from his apartment--and what it required to move forward in his life after that day.