In 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, New York Times writers Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn vividly recreate the 102-minute span between the moment Flight 11 hit the first Twin Tower on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the moment the second tower collapsed, all from the perspective of those inside the buildings--the 12,000 who escaped, and the 2,749 who did not. It's becoming easier, years later, to forget the profound, visceral responses the Trade Center attacks evoked in the days and weeks following September 11. Using hundreds of interviews, countless transcripts of radio and phone communications, and exhaustive research, Dwyer and Flynn bring that flood of responses back--from heartbreak to bewilderment to fury. The randomness of death and survival is heartbreaking. One man, in the second tower, survived because he bolted from his desk the moment he heard the first plane hit; another, who stayed at his desk on the 97th floor, called his wife in his final moments to tell her to cancel a surprise trip he had planned. In many cases, the deaths of those who survived the initial attacks but were killed by the collapse of the towers were tragically avoidable. Building code exemptions, communication breakdowns between firefighters and police, and policies put in place by building management to keep everyone inside the towers in emergencies led, the authors argue, to the deaths of hundreds who might otherwise have survived. September 11 is by now both familiar and nearly mythological. Dwyer and Flynn's accomplishment is recounting that day's events in a style that is stirring, thorough, and refreshingly understated. --Erica C. Barnett

From Publishers Weekly
Drawn from thousands of radio transcripts, phone messages, e-mails and interviews with eyewitnesses, this 9/11 account comes from the perspective of those inside the World Trade Center from the moment the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m. to the collapse of the north tower at 10:28 a.m. The stories are intensely intimate, and they often stir gut-wrenching emotions. A law firm receptionist quietly eats yogurt at her desk seconds before impact. Injured survivors, sidestepping debris and bodies, struggle down a stairwell. A man trapped on the 88th floor leaves a phone message for his fiancée: "Kris, there's been an explosion.... I want you to know my life has been so much better and richer because you were in it." Dwyer and Flynn, New York Times writers, take rescue agencies to task for rampant communications glitches and argue that the towers' faulty design helped doom those above the affected floors ("Their fate had been sealed nearly four decades earlier, when... fire stairs were eliminated as a wasteful use of valuable space"). In doing so, the authors frequently draw parallels to similar safety oversights aboard the ill-fated Titanic nearly 90 years before. Their reporting skills are exceptional; readers experience the chaos and confusion that unfolded inside, in grim, painstaking detail. B&w photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
The meticulous reportaging and superior writing on display in 102 Minutes have earned its authors high praise. Piecing together this unsentimental account from interviews, voicemail messages, e-mails, government documents, and other sources, The New York Times journalists have created an exquisitely detailed account of how thousands of individuals experienced two of the most difficult hours in U.S. history. Alternating between an intensely personal narrative style and thoughtful, critical questioning of how such a tragedy might have been ameliorated, the book is a welcome supplement to the numerous news accounts of 9/11.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From AudioFile
It's hard to imagine that the horror of 9/11 took place within a window of a mere 102 minutes, but indeed it was so. Be prepared for harrowing and heroic accounts gleaned from every possible source--phone messages, police and fire department communications, personal accounts, even the media--delineating the details at Ground Zero. Reader Ron McLarty handles the job with strong characterizations and the intensity the material demands. Listeners will find it hard to turn away from the nightmare but will find redemption in some of the stories of self-sacrifice that saved many lives. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
*Starred Review* New York Times reporters Dwyer and Flynn have compiled an unbearably painful but indispensable account of what transpired inside the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001--from the crash of American Airlines flight 11 into the upper floors of the north tower to the hallucinatory collapse of both towers in the 102 minutes that followed. The authors have combed through hundreds of interviews with witnesses and survivors, as well as transcriptions of thousands of radio transmissions, e-mails, and phone calls, to produce a taut, minute-by-minute account of the events. They also provide historical background at critical points in their narrative. In the compacted time of 102 minutes can be seen the human condition at its most despairing and its most noble: from poor souls seeking any relief from the inferno by leaping out of windows high in the north tower to four Port Authority employees who stayed behind to free more than 70 persons who were trapped. As inspired as the authors might have been by so many individual instances of courage and sacrifice, they take authorities to task: local fire and police brass, for example, for unresolved turf wars and miscommunications, and the Bush administration for underestimating al-Qaeda and hampering the 9/11 Commission's efforts at understanding exactly what happened. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Kevin Baker, New York Times, January 21, 2005
A masterpiece of reporting....succinct...riveting enough to be read in a sitting...heart-wrenching...Brilliant and troubling.

Review
“A heart-stopping, meticulous account. . . . I suspect that you, like me, will read this book in a single suspenseful sitting, even though we know the ending.” --James B. Stewart, The New York Times Book Review

“The chief virtue of 102 Minutes, Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn's unsparing, eloquent history of the struggle to survive inside the World Trade Center, is the authors' insistence that truth supplant myth. However comforting myths may be after a defeat, they're useless in assessing what went wrong and may actually be impediments to preventing future disasters.”
--John Farmer (former senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission), The Washington Post Book World

“An astounding reconstruction of what happened inside the World Trade Center. . . . These are stories, after all, you have to share.” --Susannah Meadows, Newsweek

“Exhaustively researched and smoothly written. . . . Dwyer and Flynn’s most impressive achievement: writing in a way that confers dignity on each subject. This is one book that will stay with most readers for a very long time.” -- Michelle Green, People

“For those of us haunted by the tragedy, an indispensable book.” --O Magazine

“[A] harrowing, deeply reported, practically minute-by-minute and floor-by-floor portrayal. . . . Insightful, compassionate, and unrelievedly tense.” --Michael Ollove, The Baltimore Sun

"A masterpiece of reporting....succinct...riveting enough to be read in a sitting...heart-wrenching...Brilliant and troubling." --Kevin Baker, New York Times

"Poignant, emotion-stirring and important...a story of how ordinary people exhibit extraordinary traits in times of peril." --Tom Walker, Denver Post

"It took the authors three years to describe what happened in 102 minutes...The book is worth the wait." --Ingrid Ahlgren, Providence Journal

"The writing - sometimes searing, sometimes factual but always appropriate - brings the human experience of disaster into focus." --Rosemary Herbert, Boston Herald

"Many of the stories are astounding; almost all are heartbreaking...They accord these men and women the honor they deserve." --Brian Palmer, Newsday


Ingrid Ahlgren, Providence Journal, January 23, 2005
It took the authors three years to describe what happened in 102 minutes…The book is worth the wait.

Rosemary Herbert, Boston Herald, January 9, 2005
The writing - sometimes searing, sometimes factual but always appropriate - brings the human experience of disaster into focus.

Brian Palmer, Newsday, January 2, 2005
Many of the stories are astounding; almost all are heartbreaking…They accord these men and women the honor they deserve.

David Tarrant, Dallas Morning News, January 30, 2005
Superb reporting…The book vividly captures the stories of those struggling to survive. Heartbreaking and heroic.

Book Description
The dramatic and moving account of the struggle for life inside the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, when every minute counted

At 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers-reading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it-until now.

Of the millions of words written about this wrenching day, most were told from the outside looking in. New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have taken the opposite-and far more revealing-approach. Reported from the perspectives of those inside the towers, 102 Minutes captures the little-known stories of ordinary people who took extraordinary steps to save themselves and others. Beyond this stirring panorama stands investigative reporting of the first rank. An astounding number of people actually survived the plane impacts but were unable to escape, and the authors raise hard questions about building safety and tragic flaws in New York's emergency preparedness.

Dwyer and Flynn rely on hundreds of interviews with rescuers, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts. They cross a bridge of voices to go inside the infernos, seeing cataclysm and heroism, one person at a time, to tell the affecting, authoritative saga of the men and women-the nearly 12,000 who escaped and the 2,749 who perished-as they made 102 minutes count as never before.

About the Author
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, native New Yorkers, veteran newspaper reporters, and winners of many awards together and separately, now write for The New York Times. Dwyer is co-author of Two Seconds Under the World, an account of the 1993 effort to knock down the World Trade Center, and of Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted. He is also the author of Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York City Subway. Flynn, a special projects editor at the Times, was the newspaper's police bureau chief on September 11. He previously worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News, New York Newsday, and the Stamford Advocate.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From 102 Minutes:
When he returned to 78, Greg Trapp saw a group of three Port Authority employees at work on the doors to the elevator where Tony Savas, a seventy-two-year-old structural inspector, was trapped. Trapp peered into the small gap and saw him, a man with thinning white hair, seemingly serene. One of the workers grabbed a metal easel, wedging the legs into the opening, trying to spread the doors from the bottom, where they seemed to have the greatest leverage. But their efforts had the opposite effect at the top of the doors, which seemed to pinch tighter.

At that moment, John Griffin, who had recently started as the trade center's director of operations, came over to the elevator bank. At six feet, eight inches tall, Griffin had no problem reaching the top of the door to apply pressure as the others pushed from the bottom. The doors popped apart. Out came Savas, who seemed surprised to find Griffin, his new boss, involved in the rescue. Savas seemed exhilarated, possessed of a sudden burst of energy, rubbing his hands together, or so it seemed to Trapp.

"Okay," Savas said. "What do you need me to do?"

One of the Port Authority workers shook his head. "We just got you out-you need to leave the building."

No, Savas insisted. He wanted to help. "I've got a second wind."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers - reading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it - until now." "Of the millions of words written about this wrenching day, most have been from the outside looking in. New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have taken the opposite - and far more revealing - approach. Reported solely from the perspective of the people inside the towers, 102 Minutes is the epic account of ordinary men and women who saved themselves and others." "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." From hundreds of interviews with rescuers and survivors, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts, Dwyer and Flynn have assembled a gripping narrative that is also investigative reporting of the first rank. They show that even as so many people - uniformed officers and civilians alike - responded with great valor, they did so in a context of inadequate building safety and tragic flaws in New York's emergency preparedness.

FROM THE CRITICS

James B. Stewart - The New York Times

A heart-stopping, meticulous account...I suspect that you, like me, will read this book in a single suspenseful sitting, even though we know the ending.

Rosemary Herbert - Boston Herald

The writing -- sometimes searing, sometimes factual but always appropriate -- brings the human experience of disaster into focus.

Michelle Green - People

Exhaustively researched and smoothly written.... Dwyer and Flynn's most impressive achievement: writing in a way that confers dignity on each subject. This is one book that will stay with most readers for a very long time.

Tom Walker - Denver Post

Poignant, emotion-stirring and important...a story of how ordinary people exhibit extraordinary traits in times of peril.

Kevin Baker - The New York Times