The Man Who Walked Between the Towers

On August 7, 1974, the French high wire artist Philippe Petit walked a cable strung between the still unfinished towers of the World Trade Center, and Mordicai Gerstein tells the whole plan from the ground up: Petit training on the towers of Notre Dame in Paris first, then disguising himself and his friends as construction workers to smuggle 440 pounds of cable to the top of the south tower. A first attempt to shoot an arrow trailing a line across the gap fails, and Petit crawls out along a ledge to retrieve it before the team spends three tense hours securing a proper cable between the two rooftops overnight. At dawn, dressed in black and carrying a twenty eight foot balancing pole, Petit steps out onto the wire and spends nearly an hour walking, kneeling, and even lying down on it, a quarter mile above the street, before police finally talk him back onto the roof and arrest him. A judge's sentence turns out to be as strange as the walk itself: Petit is ordered to perform a high wire show for the city's children in Central Park, where at one thrilling, deliberate moment he lets himself fall, catches the wire, and finishes the show.

Gerstein's paintings shift in scale to match the vertigo of the story, small ground level city scenes giving way to vast gatefold spreads that drop the reader alongside Petit above the rooftops. Read aloud, the book plays as pure suspense right up until its final wide page turn, followed by a quiet, elegiac closing image that only makes full sense to readers who know the towers no longer stand.