Excluding the terrorists, 2,977 men, women and children died at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, 2001. Another 6,000 sustained physical injuries; thousands more suffered from respiratory, emotional or other ailments.
In "Fall and Rise," investigative reporter Mitchell Zuckoff introduces us to hundreds of them. A minute-to-minute, suspenseful, heart-wrenching and inspirational narrative, "Fall and Rise" should endure as a prose poem memorial to a day like no other.
Zuckoff's protagonists — airline pilots, flight attendants, passengers, firefighters, office workers — look like America. In their extraordinary ordinariness, in the range of their responses to a horrific event, they testify to the value of every human life.
Trapped in an elevator of the north tower of the World Trade Center, aspiring actor Chris Young, Zuckoff tells us, reprised his rendition on the college stage of "The Impossible Dream," from the musical "Man of La Mancha."
Covered with ash from a day spent saving lives and nearly losing his own, EMT Moose Diaz, an American of Cuban/Palestinian/Haitian descent, arrived at home, sat on the floor with his wife, and cried.
Before he boarded doomed American Airlines Flight 11, Pendyala Vamsikrishna left a voice mail for his wife, Prasanna Kalahasti, a dental student, to tell her he'd be home for lunch. A month later, she died by suicide, leaving a note that indicated she had to end her "deep pain."
Jerry Henson, a former combat aviator, knowing he'd have died if David Tarantino hadn't crawled through smoke and fire to extricate him, could not stop asking himself, "How do you thank someone for saving your life?"
"You've got to remember," Wally Miller, a funeral home director and county coroner in Shanksville, told his neighbors, "that everybody that dies, that's somebody's favorite guy, whether it's a prisoner or the richest guy in town or somebody else."
