Includes bibliographical references (p. 339-409) and index.

David's Turn -- Gambit -- Street Fighters -- Surprise, Serenity, Delight -- Steel Balloons -- Endgame -- Pyramids on the Hudson -- City in the Sky -- 9/11: The Collapse -- Ruins.

It has been more than two years since the nation began mourning the lives lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center, and it has become clear that something else is being mourned as well: the towers themselves. They were the biggest and brashest icons that New York, and possibly America, has ever produced -- magnificent giants that became a familiar sight to people around the globe. Their builders were possessed of a singular determination to create wonders of capitalism as well as engineering, refusing to admit defeat before the forces of nature or the pressures of politics and economics. Few writers know the history of the towers better than New York Times reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton, who re-create the world that gave birth to the towers and the city in the sky that the towers became. They recount how the project was born out of David Rockefeller's ambition to rebuild lower Manhattan and how Austin Tobin, the dynamic executive director of the Port Authority, made that ambition his own and redoubled it. They show how politicians and business leaders with grand ambitions for revitalizing lower Manhattan overpowered the local shop owners and community activists who saw the project as a giant rupture in the urban fabric. They reveal the surprising emotional motivation that guided the architect, Minoru Yamasaki, and the bold structural innovations that later determined who would live and who would die on September 11, 2001. They follow master builder Guy Tozzoli through his nearly four decades with the towers, culminating in his last, desperate view of them on September 11. And Glanz and Lipton take us, finally, into the charged and chaotic recovery operation that could have unraveled the secrets of the buildings' collapse, but instead has left some enduring mysteries. Like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Titanic, or the Apollo spacecraft, the World Trade Center was much more than just an engineering marvel. City in the Sky tells the gripping story of how the twin towers rose and fell -- a story of New York City in good times and bad, and a story of architectural daring, human frailty, and a lost American icon.