American Ground

From the only journalist with unrestricted access to Ground Zero, the story of the cleanup of the World Trade Centre. Uniquely, William Langewiesche has had complete and unrestricted access to Ground Zero and the crew involved in the cleanup of the World Trade Centre collapse. Throughout the urgent and often dangerous effort, he accompanied the engineers, labourers, rescue workers and city officials as they brought order to a land of chaos. AMERICAN GROUND is a tour of the interlocking circles of this Dantesque world. With the knowledge and passion for which his reportage is known, Langewiesche anatomises the physical details of the collapse and deconstruction, capturing the contests of politics and personality that were its aftershock. At the centre of the book is the team of engineers, many of them instrumental in building the towers, who now had to orchestrate their disassembly. As the difficult work of extracting the rubble and the thousands of dead got underway, firefighters, police, widows, bureaucrats and profiteers attempted to claim the work - and the tragedy - as their own.
In all of its aspects - emotionalism, impulsiveness, corruption, territoriality, ingenuity and fundamental, cacophonous democracy - Langewiesche reveals the story of the deconstruction to be uniquely American and oddly inspiring, a portrait of resilience and improvisation in the face of disaster.