102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

Front Cover

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The only book on 9/11 to focus solely on the remarkable testimony of those inside the Twin Towers during the attacks.

At 8.46 am on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the Twin Towers in New York - reading emails, making calls, eating croissants... over the next 102 minutes each would become part of the most infamous and deadly terrorist attack in history, one truly witnessed only by the people who lived through it - until now.

Of the millions of words written about that unforgettable day when Al Qaeda attacked the western world, most have been from outsiders. New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have taken the more revealing approach - using real-life testimonies to report solely from the perspective of those inside the towers. 102 Minutes is the epic account of ordinary men and women whose lives were changed forever in this kamikaze act of terrorism. This unique book about unique people, includes incredible stories of bravery, courage and overcoming unbelievable odds. Immortalised in this non-fiction masterpiece are the construction manager and his colleagues who pried open the doors and saved dozens of people in the north tower; the police officer who was a few blocks away, filing his retirement papers, but grabbed his badge and sprinted to the buildings; the window washer stuck in a lift fifty floors up who used a squeegee to escape; and the secretaries who led an elderly man down eighty-nine flights of stairs.

Chance encounters, moments of grace, a shout across an office shaped these minutes, marking the border between fear and solace, staking the boundary between life and death. Crossing a bridge of voices to go inside the infernos, seeing cataclysm and herosim one person at a time, Dwyer and Flynn tell the affecting, authoritative saga of the men and women - the 12,000 who escaped and the 2,749 who perished at Ground Zero on September 11th 2001 - as they made 102 minutes count as never before.

From inside the book

Contents

Prologue
1
Its going to be the top story
21
Mom Im not calling to chat
35
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Jim Dwyer was an American reporter, columnist, and author. He was born in Manhattan on March 4, 1957. He graduated from Fordham in 1979 with a degree in general science. In 1980, he received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Early in his career he worked as a reporter for several New Jersey newspapers, The Hudson Dispatch in Union City (1980-1982), The Elizabeth Daily Journal (1982), and The Record of Hackensack (1983-1984). He then joined New York Newsday as a reporter. Later he switched to columnist, covering subways and then general topics (1986-1995). He joined the New York Times in 2001 and wrote the "About New York" column 2007-2020. He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for columns in New York Newsday. He also won as part of the New York Newsday team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting covering a subway derailment in Manhattan. He was the author or co-author of six books including; Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the Subways (1991); Two Seconds Under the Worlds (1994) with Dee Murphy, David Kocieniewski and Peg Tyre; Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted (2000) with Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck; 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Rwin Towers (2005) ; False Conviction: Innocence, Guilt, and Science (2014); More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys, Three Years, and a Chronicle of Ideas and Ambition in Silicon Valley (2015). Jim Dwyer died on October 8, 2020, in New York City. He was 63.