Rating: 
Summary: Dull and duller
Review: This has to be one of the dullest and least insightful titles addressing the World Trade Center -- and just because it was written before the attack is no excuse! Clearly a kind of thesis that somehow got published, this badly written and unevenly researched book also adds to its misdeeds by purporting to be a story of the trade center's construction, yet offering no pictorial material to bring its desert-dry text to life. I was very sad to have wasted money on this book.
Rating: 
Summary: The Port Authority's WTC
Review: Twin Towers is one of the few successful endeavors to capture the spirit of the World Trade Center. It is not a photo album, and it only contains a few black and white figures. Nevertheless, it gives a comprehensive description of all aspects of the Trade Center project, from the political motivation that lead to its construction to the way architectural trends evolved in the seventies and caused the Twin Towers to be despised by most architects. It also depicts the Port Authority as an ambitious success-driven and proud agency and the Twin Towers as an American icon. Given his biases, the author does not linger too much on the grievances of the tenants that were dislodged from the WTC site to allow its construction nor does he question the legitimity of such a project. He merely states the facts: progress is mercyless.The colorful style of the book makes it easy to read and anecdotes and quotes of some of the people who actually participated to the construction of the center abound.
What can be regretted is the book's absence of cohesion at times: it seems like each chapter has been written separately, resulting in numerous repetitions from chapter to chapter. Twin Towers also looses some marks for its endless description of the author's attendance to an introductory course to world trade, which could have been better incorporated within the text. Overall, the merit of Twin Towers is that through the pages of the book, the reader discovers the World Trade Center through the eyes of those who were directly involved with its construction; the grievance is that this is mosly a Port Authoriry's view of the World Trade Center project.
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