102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
“I chose to read 102 Minutes in large part because of sort of a time had passed since 9/11, and I was reading a lot about the assassination of JFK and how a lot of the reports were done after a pretty fair amount of time. I started thinking about what it meant to have that day; and I know it that it was sort of like that in the same way, that that was our event for the era.
102 Minutes is about the story of the people that were actually in the two Twin Towers before they were hit, as well as when they actually came down. So the 102 minutes is from the point of the first plane hitting until the actual second tower falls. It's almost a minute-by-minute description of what's happening in the towers.
I think this book would be well read by just about anybody. I think even people that are sort of intimately involved might find some form of understand beyond the emotional just by reading what else is happening. I mean it doesn't mitigate the severity to read what happened; it really is sort of more comforting to understand that these people that were trapped really had a lot of opportunities. A lot of them really did get out. I mean a shocking number got out compared to how many were in the buildings, and response wasn't entirely bungled but in fact was actually really super-efficient given the circumstances. It really was sort of dumb luck that the buildings fell, and that there are a lot of things that people have emotionalized that would be useful to read and get a deeper sense of what happened.
I would give 102 Minutes four stars. It's an excellent piece of nonfiction.”