(Listen to the podcast review)

The Man Who Walked Between the Towers
By Mordicai Gerstein

Philippe was a young man with a mission. No longer content to walk along ropes stretched between trees, Philippe Petite longed for something higher, something closer to the clouds. One day, in New York City, he looked up at two rising towers and saw the space between then and knew that this was his space. All he needed was daring and a wire long enough to walk along. He found both, and as Mordicai Gerstein tells the tale in his wonderfully rendered The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, Philippe was a sight to see as he spent an hour dancing on a wire between the two World Trade Center towers one day in August, 1974.
Yes, the towers that came tumbling down during the 9/11 tragedy rise from our memories in this true story of the French acrobat who captured the world's imagination by spending an hour in the space between the huge buildings.
Gerstein's story is a fascinating tale, particularly the escapades of Philippe and his friends as they hide out in the towers, drag a 440 pound reel of wire cable up the steps of the top unfinished floors of the buildings (that's 180 steps) and then launched the cable from one rooftop to the next with an arrow. Remember, too, that the space between the buildings was 140 feet. Robin Hood himself would have been proud. The friends worked through the night to pull the cable into place, and then, as Gerstein explains, "As the rising sun lit up the towers, out he stepped onto the wire."
It is at this point in the book that Gerstein utilizes the magic of picture books, expanding our view of Philippe on the wire by creating double and triple pages, so that the viewer gets an ever expanding sight of the daredevil on the wire, with the harbor below. The view then shifts to the street level, where we are in the crowd of people, staring up at this man walking between the buildings.
Gerstein waits until the very end of the book to remind us that such a feat will never happen again. "Now the towers are gone," Gerstein writes, showing the ghost outlines of the buildings. "But in memory, as if imprinted on the sky, the towers are still there."
It's a fitting tribute to both the man (who was recently featured in a documentary called "Man on Wire") and the structures that once defined New York City.