Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11
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THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ‘The farewell calls from the planes… the mounting terror of air traffic control… the mothers who knew they were witnessing their loved ones perish… From an author who’s spent 5 years reconstructing its horror, never has the story been told with such devastating, human force’ Daily Mail This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerising, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day. In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote about the attacks, the victims, and their families. After further years of meticulous reporting, Zuckoff has filled Fall and Rise with voices of the lost and the saved. The result is an utterly gripping book, filled with intimate stories of people most affected by the events of that sunny Tuesday in September: an out-of-work actor stuck in an elevator in the North Tower of the World Trade Center; the heroes aboard Flight 93 deciding to take action; a veteran trapped in the inferno in the Pentagon; the fire chief among the first on the scene in sleepy Shanksville; a team of firefighters racing to save an injured woman and themselves; and the men, women, and children flying across country to see loved ones or for work who suddenly faced terrorists bent on murder. Fall and Rise will open new avenues of understanding for everyone who thinks they know the story of 9/11, bringing to life – and in some cases, bringing back to life – the extraordinary ordinary people who experienced the worst day in modern American history. Destined to be a classic, Fall and Rise will move, shock, inspire, and fill hearts with love and admiration for the human spirit as it triumphs in the face of horrifying events.

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COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Mitchell Zuckoff 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover photograph © Catherine Ursillo/Getty Images

The Impossible Dream (The Quest)

From Man of La Mancha

Lyric by Joe Darion

Music by Mitch Leigh

Copyright © 1965 Andrew Scott Music and Helena Music Corp.

Copyright Renewed

All rights for Andrew Scott Music Administered by Concord Music Publishing

International Copyright Secured

All Rights Reserved

Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

Designed by Leah Carlson-Stanisic

Map by Nick Springer, copyright © 2018 Springer Cartographics LLC

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Mitchell Zuckoff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

Source ISBN: 9780008342098

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008342128

Version 2019-04-15

DEDICATION

For my children—

and everyone else’s

EPIGRAPH

The ravages of many a forest fire of a bygone age may be read today in the scars left in the tree itself. The exact year that the fire occurred and some idea of its intensity are recorded in the wood, oftentimes grown over with living tissue and hid from the casual observer.

—FOREST PATHOLOGIST J. S. BOYCE, 1921

INTRODUCTION

“The Darkness of Ignorance”

ON OCTOBER 28, 1886, PRESIDENT GROVER CLEVELAND SAILED TO A teardrop-shaped island in New York Harbor to formally accept France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty. Under leaden skies and a veil of mist, the president ended his speech with a tribute to the copper-clad lady’s torch and her symbolic power: “A stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and men’s oppression until Liberty shall enlighten the world.”

Dignitaries pounded ceremonial last rivets as warship cannons boomed. Across the water in Lower Manhattan, revelers erupted in celebration. Cobblestone streets pulsed with braying horses, throbbing drums, and blooming flower carts. Brass bands marched like front-bound soldiers, and children scrambled up lampposts to avoid being trampled.

Out-of-towners drawn to the spectacle tilted their heads to gawk at the impossibly tall buildings that loomed over them. Amused by these sky-eyed rubes, an office boy in a high tower felt seized by a raffish idea. He opened a window and tossed out long ribbons of the narrow paper tape that normally recorded the drunkard’s walk of stock prices. His pals followed suit.

“In a moment, the air was white with curling streamers,” a reporter for the New York Times observed. “Hundreds caught in the meshes of electric wires and made a snowy canopy, and others floated downward and were caught by the crowd.”

The fun was contagious. Serious men of finance became boys again, pressing against office windows to unspool paper onto the crowd. “There was seemingly no end to it,” the Times reporter wrote. “Every window appeared to be a paper mill spouting out squirming lines of tape. Such was Wall Street’s novel celebration.”

With that, the ticker-tape parade was born.

During the next one hundred fifteen years, countless tons of celebratory confetti sailed from high-rise windows onto a stretch of Lower Broadway that became known as the Canyon of Heroes. Paper blizzards honored more than two hundred explorers and presidents, war heroes and athletes, astronauts and religious figures, luminaries from Einstein to Earhart, Churchill to Kennedy, Mandela to the Mets.



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