102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
By: Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn / Narrated By: Ron McLarty
Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
An abridgment, yes. But my GOSH what a story!
102 Minutes has GOT to be one of the absolute best audiobooks about 9/11 around. Written aaaages ago, listened to yet again here in 2019, the writing aged well with time. There isn’t a shred of the outdated in this audiobook, and Ron McLarty’s narration is top notch. And at least, though written quite some time ago, it was written AFTER the 9/11 Commission Report came out (I have THAT one in my Library, but have never gotten around to listening to it… my humblest apologies). So there’s a pretty sobering conclusion as to just how very, very much was known/could’ve been surmised at the time. The attacks didn’t just come out of the blue; there was plenty of information that went back into the 90s and was knocking on the doorstep right before it all happened.
The book opens with the sleepy start of the day’s affairs in the Towers, and we get to meet a few people. We follow the journey of these people throughout the book, and we’ll be introduced to others as the narrative progresses.
ALL of it is so incredibly interesting. There’s a look at flaws in the way the FDNY was run; flaws in the way the NYPD was run. Mostly it was heartbreaking that rivalries kept the two apart. At the end there, the police tell their own to evacuate, but the firemen don’t get that message until waaaay later. There are cops running down the stairs, and they’re not bellowing the information; they’re strictly following their own orders.
Radios didn’t work; and FDNY/NYPD used different radios/different frequencies. There was no information shared between the two as prior to the events, there was no training done by both agencies acting as a single unit. That makes it comPLETEly heartbreaking when we get to the end, and one policeman stays with one fireman to help a worker evacuate: It takes THAT to bring them together.
The book is filled with graphic imagery, things you can see (Blood, body parts, flaming pieces of planes), things you can almost hear (The oh so loud crashing of bodies falling from the upper floors), things you can smell (Hair wafting the stench of smoke coming from still-blazing fires in the rubble).
And the book is especially filled with heroes. Sooo many individuals used precious time to claw through drywall to get people access to stairwells; people carried each other through difficult areas; people saved many then continued going up to more floors, looking to help, never to be seen again.
The toughest part is that you never know who’s going to make it. People are on record, so you think they’re fine and alive today, but it turns out that they actually didn’t make it from the buildings: Those were simply their last words. It sometimes became too much for me, as it’s all written so well that I reeeeally wanted the best for the individuals. And to say it became breathtaking at the end, written so that the tension was darned near unbearable, not knowing who makes it out of the stairwell as time ticks down, is an understatement. I was on the edge of my seat at the end there.
There are things that’ll make you mad (Most especially how building codes were changed prior to building the World Trade Center), but there’s so much more that’ll make you quite simply feel proud of your fellow man.
Normally I stay the heck away from Abridged books, especially ones that I enjoyed reading in print so much, but I was just toooo drawn into hearing more and more about 9/11 that I gave in and got this. I’m so glad I did. Abridged, yes. But it captured all that was horrible, all that was heroic.
102 Minutes has it all!
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