102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn

It's tough to read a book about a disaster when you know how it turns out. This is the story of the 9/11 disaster at the World Trade Center. The authors did a good job of re-creating what must have happened from the time the first plane hit through when the last tower fell. (the 102 minutes referenced in the title). The authors also did a good job of naming people. . those people because individuals, not just statistics. So many of those above the crash site might have been saved if the building had been built in a different way, if the emergency response teams had better communication among themselves, if the people had gone down instead of up, if if if. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback with 20/20 vision in retrospect; it was a day no one had ever imagined. Much of the information in the book comes from tape recordings of the individuals inside the buildings and from oral histories from interviews with survivors. (There are pages and pages of documentation.) I read this book the week before the 9th anniversary of the attack, which made all those people and their families very real to me. I kept wondering what I would have done if I was in that person or this person's position. Of all the nonfiction books about disasters, this one moved me the most. Considering newspaper journalists were the author, I also thought it was very well written (see my comments about Zeitoun and Enrique's Journey )