City in the Sky

Yesterday I finished City in the Sky, a detailed history of the World Trade Center. It is a thoroughly researched and well-written history of the buildings, written by two New York Times reporters who started investigating the towers on 9/11 and who wrote tons of articles between them on various aspects of the buildings. The book gives a very complete picture of the towers: why they were built, how they were designed, what happened to them when they were hit, and ideas of what caused them to collapse. The beginning of the book was a bit slow as it went into the politics of getting a World Trade Center built and deciding where to place it in Lower Manhattan. But the story picked up when it got to the chapters on the design of the buildings and all of the engineering tests that were done to be sure that such massive buildings would be safe. For instance, ground-breaking wind tests were done with models of the towers and the first results were not good: the tops of the towers moved way too much in the wind, a distance that would translate to 20-40 feet of movement in the real buildings. You just couldn't work at the top of building if it was like that, so modifications were made.

After one relatively short chapter on the 30-year life of the Trade Center, there are two chapters about the details of what happened on September 11, and how the clean-up of ground zero was carried out. They are haunting and sometimes very hard to read, but they are written in a very journalistic way, calmly presenting the facts without any editorial comment. It is almost refreshing to read about the events in this sort of stripped-down way, erasing all of the politics of the last 5 years and just looking at what the people in the towers had to deal with. Terrorism and the reasons why the planes were flown into the towers aren't discussed, the book doesn't get all patriotic, it just presents the details of that day, and the clean-up and investigations afterwards, in a stark, thorough manner.

Reading about the events did almost create a sense of disconnection from what happened, somehow, like it all seemed so impossible that it started to feel like fiction. Also it all feels so long ago, perhaps because it can sometimes be hard to remember life before the "war on terror" and irrational fear and foolish rules for flying on planes. I didn't mean to read the book so close to the anniversary of 9/11, it was just coincidence, but it means I'll be viewing the various anniversary programs in a different light.