Ordinary Heroes

July 15, 2021
A former assistant chief of the New York City Fire Department delivers a firsthand account of the terrible events of 9/11. Pfeifer opens at a firehouse on Duane Street, where two young French filmmakers were shooting footage for a documentary tracing the making of a firefighter in the training of a young recruit. All that was needed was a fire. Pfeifer and the crew got far more than they bargained for when they watched the first hijacked plane crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. "As the closest chief in lower Manhattan," writes the author, "I knew instantly I was going to be the first chief on the scene and would have to take command." Upon arrival, he had to make difficult decisions: It would take firefighters 60 minutes to reach the 93rd floor, where the fire was raging. Meanwhile, the building was already beginning to teeter, finally requiring Pfeifer to go against the ingrained culture of the FDNY and withdraw his crews from the building and leave the area before the towers fell. That process was completed just before 10:28 a.m., when, as Pfeifer writes, "For the first time, I realized that both towers had completely collapsed. The buildings were not hiding behind the smoke. They no longer existed." In the aftermath, Pfeifer--all of whose company survived, even though 343 firefighters, including his brother, would not--analyzed failures of communication that kept firefighters and police from coordinating their efforts, which he would see through to a thoroughgoing reform that paid off when US Airways 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson River in 2009. He also pioneered cross-agency counterterrorism efforts. "The heart of crisis leadership is the ability to sustain hope by unifying efforts to solve complex problems in the face of great tragedy," he writes, and this account shows the great strides forward that he helped engineer after just such a tragedy. A heartfelt, affecting book that sheds new light on one of the darkest moments in recent history.

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August 1, 2021
The summer of 2001 had been mostly uneventful for Manhattan's Duane Street Firehouse in terms of emergency calls. Two French filmmakers had even been documenting the life of a young probationary fireman named Tony, who was looking to gain full firefighter status and respect. Battalion chief Pfeifer, however, a 20-year veteran of the FDNY, saw the dry spell as disquieting: a calm before the storm. In the middle of a 24-hour shift, Pfeifer received a call reporting the smell of gas. The call, which turned out to be a false alarm, fatefully left Pfeifer and his company only a few blocks from the Twin Towers when a plane hit the North Tower, and Pfeifer wasted no time sending his men to the World Trade Center. Pfeifer recounts the horrific day as he narrowly escapes the collapse of the North Tower. The terror and confusion is palpable as he writes of making it back to the station and attempting to account for his brethren. Noteworthy for its straightforwardness, Pfeifer's memoir is painful, yet powerful.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.