American Ground

by WilliamLangewiesche (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $12.70

  Selected as one of the best books of 2002 by The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Sun-Times

  Within days after September 11, 2001, William Langewiesche had secured unique, unrestricted, round-the-clock access to the World Trade Center site. American Ground is a tour of this intense, ephemeral world and those who improvised the recovery effort day by day, and in the process reinvented themselves, discovering unknown strengths and weaknesses. In all of its aspects--emotionalism, impulsiveness, opportunism, territoriality, resourcefulness, and fundamental, cacophonous democracy--Langewiesche reveals the unbuilding to be uniquely American and oddly inspiring, a portrait of resilience and ingenuity in the face of disaster.

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.30

  From the only journalist with unrestricted access to Ground Zero, the story of the cleanup of the World Trade Centre. Uniquely, William Langewiesche has had complete and unrestricted access to Ground Zero and the crew involved in the cleanup of the World Trade Centre collapse. Throughout the urgent and often dangerous effort, he accompanied the engineers, labourers, rescue workers and city officials as they brought order to a land of chaos. AMERICAN GROUND is a tour of the interlocking circles of this Dantesque world. With the knowledge and passion for which his reportage is known, Langewiesche anatomises the physical details of the collapse and deconstruction, capturing the contests of politics and personality that were its aftershock. At the centre of the book is the team of engineers, many of them instrumental in building the towers, who now had to orchestrate their disassembly. As the difficult work of extracting the rubble and the thousands of dead got underway, firefighters, police, widows, bureaucrats and profiteers attempted to claim the work - and the tragedy - as their own. In all of its aspects - emotionalism, impulsiveness, corruption, territoriality, ingenuity and fundamental, cacophonous democracy - Langewiesche reveals the story of the deconstruction to be uniquely American and oddly inspiring, a portrait of resilience and improvisation in the face of disaster.