Dust to Deliverance - Jessica DuLong   (2021)

A Night to Remember - Walter Lord    (1955)

When I moved to NYC more than 20 years ago, I was reading a lot. I bounced around town playing ballet and modern dance classes during the day and played or hung out at the clubs at night, all of it on the subway. I rode it so many times during a week, my 7-day pass made each ride a quarter. And everywhere I went, I carried a bag. I needed ballet music, sure, but I needed my tuning hammer, my weed, a notebook and pen, a bottle of water and whatever book I was reading. I was married to a writer at the time so I read voraciously just to keep up. And the subway was where I did it - the place I spent whatever idle time I had on the way to the next thing. 

The last ten years have been a reading struggle - no more writer wife to kick my reading butt, a little girl and a move to beyond the reasonable reaches of the subway. And I quit playing dance classes. A vortex of illiteracy. 

Thanks to the pandemic and my daughter now reading her own books, I have been reading with some consistency again. I had to start with books my friends have written in the interim and I've shared a couple of those with you on the FB. Here's another one.

The kid is in a Titanic phase - the movie, docs and a book of things you never knew about the Titanic. So I picked up the famous Walter Lord account of the tragedy, A Night to Remember, so we could read it together. And it is really good. Couldn't put it down, even though I know the whole story mostly already. It constantly reminded me of the last book I read written by my friend, Jessica DuLong, Saved at the Seawall. 

Jessica's book is every bit as riveting as Lord's. At the center is the 9-11 tragedy. But her's is a story from the water's perspective. I did not know that day was the largest maritime evacuation in history. And like the Lord book, she masterfully tells dozens of stories simultaneously in the real-time aftermath of the attack and the collapse of the WTC towers - victims and their literal life preservers colliding in the toxic soot-filled cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan, covering everyone and everything. It was panic and confusion and the natural place to go was to the water where a for real rag-tag assemblage of crafts was waiting to get people off the island to New Jersey. I saw the first buiding collapse from my stoop in Brooklyn. I thought I knew a lot about that day. This book is a gripping insight into the NY harbor world and a new perspective of a day we thought we all knew.