For the last couple months or so I've been slowly making my way through Lynne Sagalyn's Power at Ground Zero, which tells the story of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. Throughout the book she quotes from City in the Sky, often referring to it as the "definitive" book on the project. It got to the point that I felt the need to read it before advancing through Sagalyn's book. I'm glad I did, not so much in terms of what I learned, but because the book is so good. Glanz and Lipton, reporters at the New York Times, cover the project from its gestation ca. 1939 to its collapse in 2001. Published in hardcover two years after 9/11, I'm surprised I didn't pick it up sooner. Nevertheless, I'm even more surprised by how much new information I gleaned from the beautifully written book. Easily the strongest impact came in the chapter on September 11 and the collapse of the towers, the ninth of ten chapters. The authors manage to put the reader inside the tower through transcripts of phone conversations and physical descriptions of what it must have been like on that Tuesday morning. By the end of that chapter I was drained, even more so than on my first visit to the 9/11 museum. Perhaps this is because the latter effectively made me relive my thoughts and feelings of that day, while Glanz and Lipton made me live through a calamity that nobody should have had to endure. ( )

Because City in the Sky was written just two short years after the horrific events of September 11, 2001 and the spectacular collapse of the World Trade Center towers it is easy to accuse Glanz and Lipton of jumping on the 9/11 bandwagon and capitalizing on an unprecedented tragedy. But, the events of 9/11/2001, specifically the seemingly impossible collapse of the towers doesn't appear in the narrative until the very end - practically the last chapter. Instead, Glanz and Lipton start from the very beginning. They present the key players and historical events in a tightly written account of how the World Trade Center went from an ambitious idea to an iconic city in the sky. To read City in the Sky is to witness the conception, birth, life and death of a New York City and world icon. Just like the Rockefellers before him, David Rockefeller harnessed his ambition and went to head with shop keepers, politicians and naysayers to build an architectural masterpiece. ( )

Sobering ( )