William Langewiesche was the only journalist given unrestricted access to what became known as Ground Zero - the eleven storeys of twisted metal and compressed concrete that had been 110 storeys of the World Trade Center. He arrived within days of September 11, 2001, and left after the final ceremony in May 2002.
In beautifully precise and elegant prose, 'American Ground' portrays the unimaginable. Langewiesche tells the story of what he witnessed in the innermost recesses of the collapse: the continuing danger of the unstable rubble, the terrible underground silence and the haunting beauty of destruction.
Above all, he tells the previously untold story of the people who inhabited this intense, ephemeral world: the rescue workers, labourers, city officials, engineers (some of whom had built the towers), construction companies and consultants charged with bringing order to an instance of chaos unprecedented on American soil.
As the difficult work of extracting the rubble and the thousands of dead got underway, some workers behaved heroically, and some 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 as revealing about America as the actions which caused it, and oddly inspiring, a portrait of resilience and improvisation in the face of disaster.
