Customer Reviews

Liberty Street: Encounters at Ground Zero

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"Liberty Street: Encounters at ground Zero" is an amazingly powerful and beautiful book. In my opinion this book takes its place with great works that bring to life a place for the reader, like Hemingway's "A Movable Feast" does Paris, and Kerouac's "On the Road" does this great country of ours. Only this book gives you an unfictionalized account of a place that in some ways has vanished forever - the community of Lower Manhattan that worked to clean up, rebuild and relocate back into their beloved neighborhood. This book is a must read, not only for its profoundly elegant and engaging writing, but for its chronicling of a very significant time and place in the history of America.

I have just read an advance review copy of this remarkable book. You're sick of all the jingoism, political exploitation and demagoguery that the disaster of 9/11 entailed. You want an intelligent and poetic account of how lives were altered in the neighborhoods around Ground Zero - how, in fact, Ground Zero itself became a "neighborhood" with a two-plus-years-long half-life. In other words, you want to read this book. If you have shared in the national malaise that settled in after the disaster, and have been further depressed by the heavy-handed bungling of the response, you want to read this book. Ground Zero became populated by remarkable men and women, and in its surrounding neighborhoods residents who wouldn't be bullied, badgered or scared away by bureaucrats or terrorists alike strove indomitably to preserve and rebuild their lives. You knew nothing about any of this until this book. No one cared - least of all the politicians who were aggrandizing the spotlight with their hand-wringing and buffoon-like pronouncements about justice and patriotism - that miracles were being performed on a daily basis by lower Manhattan residents who wouldn't be broken. Few of us were ever informed that while our attention was being deliberately diverted by a bogus war, the real American spirit was being challenged by bureaucratic indifference and stupidity, yet triumphing in the mouth of hell in lower Manhattan regardless, as genuinely as on any fraudulently engendered battlefield among the oil derricks of the Middle East. You'll encounter all of this within the pages of Peter Josyph's stunning account of the transient world of Ground Zero. I grant that no one could blame you for being sick of this whole subject, but then, before this book was written I don't think many of us really had an opportunity to comprehend what the real subject was. Moreover, Josyph's sinuous prose ripples and roils with an angry poetic music that never succumbs to partisan political banality. It will captivate you on its own terms. This book is a knockout. Don't miss it.

Peter Josyph is an amazing writer and this book is another tour-de-force showcasing his thrilling style which, considering the subject of 9/11, makes for a truly haunting journey that is both horrifying and beautiful.
The sections where Josyph talks about the odor and dust of the 11th are examples of his best writing. More than anything, this book shows how one event became an integrated part of New York and New Yorkers - both mentally and, perhaps most interestingly, physically.
In other books, Josyph has proven to be a gifted interviewer and the last part of the book shows his skills as an interview yet again. His talk with Atlantic Monthly correspondent William Langwiesche (author of American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center) is one of the highlights of this book. Josyph's chapter on the nausea he started to feel whenever and wherever he saw a construction sight is a fascinating piece. It's understandable why writing about this strange phenomenon would eventually steer Josyph towards writing an entire book, rather than just an essay on the nausea as first intended.
Writing as an artist, Josyph's view on things is unique. The juxtaposition of great beauty and immense destruction shows the commplexity of the 11th in every aspect of whatever "the 11th" means to different people. In the song "On that Day" about 9/11 Leonard Cohen sings "Did you go crazy / or did you report / on that day". Josyph reported. Maybe he went crazy as well, but it was a craze that drove him to find answers. The result is an important historical document that deserves to be on the shelf with any other great volume on 9/11.