What Is Life Worth?: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11 [Hardcover]

Kenneth Feinberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 14, 2005

As head of the 9/11 victim compensation fund, Kenneth Feinberg was asked to do the impossible: calculate the dollar value of over 5,000 people killed and injured in the 9/11 terrorist attacks Just days after September 11th 2001, Kenneth Feinberg was appointed to administer the federal 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, a unique, unprecedented fund established by the US Congress to compensate families who lost a loved one on 9/11 and survivors who were physically injured in the attacks. Those who participated in the fund were required to waive their right to sue the airlines involved in the attacks, as well as other potentially responsible entities. When the programme was launched, many families criticized it as a brazen, tight-fisted attempt to protect the airlines from lawsuits. The Fund was also attacked as attempting to put insulting dollar values on the lives of lost loved ones. The families were in pain. And they were angry. Over the course of the next three years, Feinberg spent almost all of his time meeting the families, convincing them of the generosity and compassion of the programme and calculating appropriate awards for each and every claim. The Fund proved to be a dramatic success with over 97 per cent of eligible families participating. It also provided important lessons for Feinberg who became the filter, the arbitrator and the target of family suffering. Feinberg learned about the enduring power of family grief, love, fear, faith, frustration and courage. Most importantly, he learned that no cheque, no matter how large could make the families and victims of 9/11 whole again.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. When Feinberg writes that "[t]he cacophony of arguments validated my original preference: to refuse to evaluate individual suffering" midway through this frank memoir, the reader already trusts him enough to know that he is not being crass or unfeeling: he is being honest. By then, Feinberg, a lawyer who has been on two presidential commissions and has done Agent Orange litigation, has established his judicious forthrightness and his dedication to "the success of the fund"—getting as many families as possible to opt in to the trust, which he headed and which was established to award cash to the 9/11 victims, rather than sue the government. The problem: how, and how much? Feinberg's willingness to put himself into the book makes what could have been an alternately dry and self-serving case study crackle with care, frustration, intellectual energy and good writing. Feinberg and his team ran through every argument and counterargument for compensation and its various possible permutations, and he presents the debate, and his ultimate conclusions as head of the 9/11 fund, with an earned conviction and clarity, even on stat-heavy pages. With its combination of a strong personality, undeniably compelling subject matter and a great title, this understated, passionate trek into the dismal terrain is likely to be a major surprise bestseller. Anything but macabre, it ends up, in its own way, celebrating life. (June 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Feinberg's experience as an attorney and a mediator, having mediated the suit between Vietnam vets and manufacturers of Agent Orange, made him uniquely qualified to handle the delicate task of compensating families victimized by the 9/11 terrorist attack and reducing the prospects for lawsuits against the airlines and the U.S. government. But his experiences did not prepare him for the emotional toll of the unprecedented task. In this personal account, Feinberg calls his charge one of the most harrowing yet rewarding experiences of his life. For 32 months, he tried to "fill the hole in a family's life with money," attempting to bring some fairness to settlements for the families of wealthy stockbrokers, middle-class firemen and policemen, and immigrant restaurant workers. What Feinberg struggled with most was the awesome task of deciding the value of human life, acknowledging his own clumsy insensitivity at the beginning, and gradually learning to deal with grieving families who wanted as much to be heard as to be compensated. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 213 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; First Edition edition (June 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586483234
• ISBN-13: 978-1586483234
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #469,648 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A thoughtful, fair, and unassuming memoir, June 20, 2005

By 

Jonathan Groner (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What Is Life Worth?: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11 (Hardcover)

Kenneth Feinberg, who had been a congressional aide, a big-firm lawyer, and a mediator, was the ideal person to serve as "special master" adjudicating the claims of 9/11 victims and survivors. This is his relatively brief, spare, unassuming, thoughtful memoir of that nearly impossible task. The best thing about this book is that it does not read as if it were written by a lawyer. Feinberg's empathy for the victims of this unimaginable tragedy becomes very clear. For him, the assignment was literally a life-changing event, as he closed down his law office and became a law school lecturer. Parts of the narrative were a bit slow, but this is an important book.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Definitely Worth Reading, August 1, 2005

By 

Louise S. Cox (Windsor, CT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What Is Life Worth?: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11 (Hardcover)

Mr. Feinberg clearly tells the history of the 9/11 fund to compensate victims. While it is written very factually, which is how a lwayer's mind is trained, the part I found most fascinating was his candidcy with how his own life changed after this experience. He also shared the various attitudes of those who made claims and tired to understand with empathy and compassion their responses. He continually strived toward equity throughout and was willing to listen to critics in order to be as fair as possible. A short and necessary read!!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mr. Feinberg Reports, July 11, 2006

By 

Anonymous "booksandcookies" (Charleston, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Is Life Worth?: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11 (Hardcover)

I thought this book functioned as a "report to the taxpayers", perhaps a counterpart to Kenneth Feinberg's report to the president, on his administration of the compensation fund for victims of 9/11 created by Congressional statute immediately after the 9/11 attacks. The writing is clear and very articulate. Mr. Feinberg does not seem to me to be self-promoting, as another reader commented, but simply reiterating his qualifications and his rationale for the way he administered this fund. For purposes of this review, I am attempting to keep my feelings about the creation of the fund itself separate from Mr. Feinberg's administration of it and his account of that process. His account of it is a very engrossing read - something that came as a surprise to me. I read it twice, once to myself and once aloud to the family. I think this should be required reading in high schools and colleges because it is an extremely important facet of the whole event (which we are still in the throes of) that we speak of as "9/11". There are ethical, philosophical, political, legal and undoubtedly many other positions from which to view the fund and its administration vis a vis history, precedent, and so on. This book is an extremely important report to the taxpayers. I only wish there could be a countervailing report FROM the taxpayers! I do think Mr. Feinberg performed good service to Congress' wishes expressed in the statute creating the fund. However, to refer to the fund as reflective of the great generosity of American taxpayers is a bit disingenuous since American taxpayers did not have a say in the creation or any other aspect of the fund. It was created very quickly after 9/11 and was completely open-ended, an unprecedented action. Its creation raises far more questions than are answered and the implication that it was used to squelch asking many questions still haunts the whole process. However, that was not Mr. Feinberg's issue; he had the statute and the fund and the victims to deal with and his report covers his purview with excellent clarity. I highly recommend this book to every American and would like to see it on bestseller lists, ahead of Ms. Coulter's recently published rant. Mr. Feinberg is obviously an intelligent, dedicated, conscientious, fair-minded man whose very thoughtful account of this particular facet of 09/11 warrants widespread attention.