Glass Inferno

Rating:
Summary: The True "Towering Inferno" Book !
Review: Easily the best of the two books the epic disaster movie "The Towering Inferno" was based upon !

While "The Tower" is a 125 storie building located near the World Trade Center in N.Y.C., the "Glass Tower" is a 66 storie building located in San Francisco (which is where the fictional
137 storie Glass Tower is located in "The Towering Inferno").

"Glass Tower" has much more action, and especially a much more dramatic ending than "The Tower".

"Glass Tower" spends much more time focusing on the Fire Department's fire-fighting and rescue efforts of the people trapped on the top floor than "The Tower", which wastes far too much time with the charecters worrying about who & what caused the fire. Almost no time was devoted to the fire department's efforts.

After having read both books and having watched "The Towering Inferno" many times, there is no doubt the two movie studios derived most of the screenplay from "Glass Tower".

If you want to read only one of the two books the movie was based upon, you need only read "Glass Tower" - the TRUE "Towering Inferno" !

Rating:
Summary: "The Glass Inferno" generates serious heat
Review: Twentieth-Century Fox and Warner Bros. knew what they were doing when they adapted The Glass Inferno into the disaster epic, The Towering Inferno. Scortia and Robinson put together an convincing scenario in which San Francisco's tallest building goes up in flames.

There's no denying that the authors know their stuff. The characters and the action stay crisp and sharp. Even today, such a cautionary novel should give readers pause the next time they venture into the concrete caverns of our modern cities.

Though not as good, The Tower, by Richard Martin Stern, should be read in tandem with The Glass Inferno. The Towering Inferno also draws from it.

Rating:
Summary: Great Read.....and Mrs. Mueller doesn't die in THIS one!
Review: When Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox decided to make their own high rise disaster pic, one picked "The Tower" and the other "The Glass Inferno"; they realized they each will be making similar movies. So in a rare instance of common sense, the two studio combined resources and churned out "The Towering Inferno". Despite having the movie based on the two novels, the end result resemble more on "The Glass Inferno" rather than "The Tower." In fact, the only thing the movie retain from "The Tower" was the breeches bouy and several characters, some of which have their own counterparts in "The Glass Inferno".

If you have seen "The Towering Inferno", then you will know what the novel is about. Of course, the novel doesn't have the stupid insipid dialogue the movie was saddled with. And "The Glass Infnero" ends on a brighter note that the movie.

As a point of interest, the building is known as the "Glass Tower", 66 stories high and equipped with a scenic elevator and a promenade room. And Jennifer Jones' character, Lisolette Mueller, who "enjoyed" a spectacular death scene in the movie, survived in the novel in her own spectacular way (she climbed down the blown stariwell BY HERSELF without help and with a kid on her back).

Overall, the book is good, espcially how chapters are devoted to the fire itself; describing it as "the beast", and chronicling it from its "birth" with a cotton string as its umbilical cord, and to its death....as if the fire was a living entity in itself.