American Ground
The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Sun-Times all named it one of the finest novels of 2002.
William Langewiesche had acquired full, round-the-clock access to the World Trade Center site just days after September 11, 2001. American Ground takes you on a tour of this tumultuous, fleeting environment and the people who improvised the recovery effort day by day, reinventing themselves in the process and uncovering previously undisclosed talents and flaws. Langewiesche portrays the unbuilding to be particularly American and curiously uplifting, a portrayal of perseverance and creativity in the face of tragedy, in all of its aspects—emotionalism, impulsiveness, opportunism, territoriality, resourcefulness, and basic, cacophonous democracy.
