The rising The twenty-year battle to rebuild the World Trade Center

The author, whose middling-size Silverstein Properties won a bid in the 1980s to lease and develop the last undeveloped parcel at the World Trade Center (Building 7), relates how his company somehow went on to secure a 99-year lease of the main WTC site, including the Twin Towers, for $3.2 billion. The deal was signed on July 24, 2001. Mere weeks later, the day after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that destroyed all seven buildings at the site, Silverstein found himself on the phone with New York Governor George Pataki, discussing how to rebuild. Silverstein, now 93 years old, relates with clarity and concision the decades-long odyssey that led his company through a perilous tangle of insurers, opportunistic local and state politicians, demanding investors, layers of lawyers, the press, and, most painfully, the families of those lost on 9/11 who had yet to find closure at Ground Zero. The result is a surprising page-turner and a rare look at how the levers of power operate at the highest strata of commerce and government.

In this feisty debut memoir, Silverstein, the New York real estate developer who signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center two months before it was attacked on September 11, recaps his efforts to build new skyscrapers on the site. He recounts successfully lobbying Congress for legislation protecting him against wrongful-death lawsuits; suing insurance companies that initially refused to pay out the billions of dollars covered by his policies, which he augmented by claiming the two plane crashes counted as separate incidents; and tussling with architect Daniel Libeskind over the Freedom Tower's design. Silverstein's account never lacks for melodrama, as when he recalls feeling "like a jilted lover" after the Salomon Brothers investment bank backed out of a World Trade Center lease for a glitzier building uptown. Offering a spirited rebuttal to critics who accused him of overcommercializing the reboot out of mercenary motives, Silverstein insists his goal was to show "the terrorists that they had not won," even as he elsewhere makes clear that the project required obsessive calculation of costs and profit ("As someone who had actually put up commercial office towers, I knew you had to pay a great deal of attention to feasibility"). Though Silverstein's detractors will find much to dispute, this classic New York saga about the symbiosis of grand civic ambition and rugged pragmatism stands tall. Photos. Agent: Eric Lupfer, UTA. (Sept.)