Meanwhile, firefighters, carrying impossible 90-pound loads, perished. The book’s most indelible image is that of a hundred fire fighters, exhausted, resting on the 19th floor of the North Tower. Because of obsolete walkie-talkies, they didn’t know about the South Tower’s collapse.

Here, verbatim, is the scene as court officers Baccellieri, Moscola, and Wender, who’ve come down from floor 51, reach floor 19, and see the resting firefighters:

Most were sitting, and had stripped off their turnout coats. Helmets off. Some were down to their blue T-shirts, maps of sweat blotting through the fabric emblazoned with the Fire Department shield. Wender saw that some were lying down. Axes resting against oxygen tanks. They could not be hearing, Wender thought, what we are hearing.

Baccellieri and Moscola took in the scene. They guessed there were at least 100 firefighters on the floor.

“We’re getting out of here,” Baccellieri yelled. “We’ve been told we’ve got to get out of the building.”

No one moved.

Baccellieri, Moscola, and Wender survived. All 100 firefighters died. Reason being no one told them that the tower they were in was already leaning and, near the top, buckling.

In spare, eloquent prose, the authors reconstruct these scenes. And unlike the moronic football fans who, in weeks following the attack, painted their faces red, white, blue — as if the post-9/11 trauma were a football pep rally — they never romanticize. They tell the truth: the firefighters, though brave, marched with way too much equipment to their doom. Office workers, like the poor souls who worked for Mizuho, descended to the lobby and were told to go back, where they died. Jumpers leapt to their horrific deaths, not because they were brave, but because the heat was unbearable. The towers, because of design flaws, were ripe for collapse. Most ordinary people, such as Abe Zelmanowitz, who, rather than saving himself, stuck by his quadriplegic friend Ed Beyea, acted with heroic unselfishness. Someone oughta build a statue to these guys.

And someone oughta give Dwyer and Flynn one of those fancy writing awards. They explain, in layman’s terms, the reasons why the buildings collapsed, the unique architecture, the lack of fire-proofing. And over everything they write hangs the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, the attack that should have spurred the fire-proofers to work doubly fast; they didn’t. By Sept 11, only 20 floors had been adequately fire-proofed. This appalling ineptness, along with corrupt building codes from the 60s—including bunching elevators and staircases at the buildings’ cores to increase rentable office space—killed thousands.

I too was a New York loser-journalist guiltily-smitten with celebrity, though I worked at the Village Voice, and my celebrities were not as Brad Pittish as yours.

The Voice is not Vanity Fair, but the high-school cliques were the same. Most everyone at the Voice was younger than me (I was around 40 at the time), so I didn’t get invited out to lunch much (ever, in fact). Also, I was married and had a kid; that was a problem (I think the world is divided into those who have kids and those who don’t). And the political correctness was probably even more obnoxious than Vanity Fair’s—in the fact-checking room, for example, workers protested because a supply box was labeled “colored paper.” On another occasion, a fact-checker angrily insisted I change the word “freshmen” to “freshpeople.”

Still, the Voice—it was under John Larsen in those days, half of one of those power couples you write so disturbingly about at the end of your book—published serious stuff: about politics, the environment, public schools, even if the pieces were sometimes a little long-winded and boring.

So even though I enjoyed your book, read it straight through (one of the few books recommended to me lately that I haven’t forced myself to finish—more on that later), I was inwardly laughing that the people you write about are from a caste stratospherically different from the vast majority of drones who make this city run.

Not that I’m saying you didn’t bring up issues that I thought and thought about even when I wasn’t reading your memoir—classless America vs. aristocratic England, political correctness in journalism (I shudder what would happen to Mencken were he alive), money and beauty and getting laid (obviously, you were dating before Craig’s List—being a writer, you would have scored many, many times).

Above all, I took the book to be a love letter to Graydon Carter. Seriously. I can’t imagine anyone—and I’ve read a few reviews to this effect—thinking this was a nasty portrait. He came off as so infinitely patient, even fatherly, towards you, that anyone suggesting otherwise must be nuts.

As for everyone else, I marked one passage in your book that struck me:

…Time and again during the five years I spent in Manhattan, I had a sense of encountering people who weren’t quite human…as if they all came off the same production line; they lacked the divine spark that makes all human beings unique.

You could say thee same for almost all white-collar jobbers. (You might read Andrew Sullivan’s essay on homosexuality in America, about this drive towards diversity, but only if the members of each group are Americanized and homogenous). I find no tolerance for bad jokes, bad dressers, bad haircuts, less-than-perfect hygiene, incorrect language (or, God forbid, bad spelling). Words that are banished one year—“chick,” “babe,” “broad,” “girl,” “negro”—are magically resurrected the next. Freedom-of-thought wise, it sucks.

I have also been thinking a lot about what you wrote because I have a special needs friend. He is smart, but he doesn’t fit in. He is the opposite of your friend Alex. He is way more socially inept than even you (by the way, I think you overdo the self-deprecation thing a tad—yes, it made you more likeable and thus your critiques more believable, but sometimes you were straining. I mean how socially-inept can you be if your roommate is Sophie Dahl?). Anyway, I am pissed as hell that someone with a pure heart, who cannot lie, who forgives his tormentors, spends his life alone because people are so fucked-up. He won’t make anyone’s A list.

Speaking of good-looking, politically-correct people, just before your book, I read The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. Yeah, it was an interesting treatise on the Indian caste system, but the prose was preciously self-conscious, and if I read one more novel with an adult-rendered-mute-because-of-childhood-trauma, I will rip out what’s left of my hair. Anyway, I think another reason—aside from the preciousness—the novel won the Booker Prize, is because Roy is so damn good-looking. She taught aerobics, right? She’s got saucer eyes and luscious lips, right? She’s a South Asian Zadie Smith, right? Are there any ugly, best-selling authoresses in England?

Oh well, it must feel good knowing that everyone back at VF is reading your book, pissed they weren’t mentioned.

Dear Steven and Stephen,

Having read Malcolm Gladwell’s rave, having understood and loved the book’s premise—that hidden statistics we don’t want to look at tell the real story—we expected a lot from your bestseller, Freakonomics.

We were not completely disappointed. Freakanomics is always thought-provoking, and scores a number of bull eyes. For example, your attack on the theories of why crime plunged in the 90s (and, indirectly, the Giuliani myth) is pure fun (though, last time we looked, abortion is still legal and serious crime is going up).

A lot of your other stuff is lame.

Take the chapter on what teachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common (they both cheat). No problem with the part about Sumo wrestlers. We know zero about the sport, but what you say is fascinating and believable.

But then you send up exactly the sort of pompous declaration you love to deflate. You present a set of interesting, credible statistics that probably show that a number of Chicago public school teachers have cheated on their students’ standardized tests—by changing answers after the tests were handed in.

The first problem with this story is that it is not news. The fact that public school teachers change answers is pre-Cambrian. Anyone who assumes otherwise doesn’t know much about public school teaching. We taught in New York City public schools for eight years, and some of our principals “accidentally” gave us the tests a few days in advance. You bet we reviewed the problems with the kids. Some teachers walked between the desks, mouthing correct answers to kids who promptly complied. Our incentives for doing so had nothing to do with negative consequences for lower scores.

Indeed, incentives—your own chosen ground—is where you guys really falter. You claim that teachers in Chicago cheated on standardized tests because of new “high-stakes testing” meaning testing that carries consequences for the teachers:

With high-stakes testing, a teacher whose students test poorly can be censured or passed over for a raise or promotion. If the entire school does poorly, federal funding can be withheld; if the school is put on probation, the teacher stands to be fired.

To which we say, What happened to your righteous statistical thrusts?

Let’s make the likely assumption that many students in the Chicago public schools did poorly on the high-stakes test (though, strangely, the book never says how many). While you present compelling statistics that were used to catch teachers who probably cheated, you never say how many teachers were actually fired or were passed over for a raise or promotion. Taking a wild guess, we’d say, for tenured teachers, it was less than ten. And how many schools lost federal funding because of low test scores? You don’t say. (By the way, we’ve heard of stupid, counter-productive consequences, but this one takes the cake. Why punish kids for having bad teachers?). Oh, and how many schools were put on probation? Again, your book that relies so heavily on numbers does not say. And does putting a school on probation make the teachers teach better? We’ve never read any evidence that a similar program in New York State (SUR) did so.

Back to incentives. You incentive freaks don’t get that teachers don’t cheat on standardized tests because they want to get raises or promotions—raises are meager and unfair and why would you promote a good teacher out of the classroom—they cheat because they want to make sure the kids they hate, the kids who’ve shit on every carefully-planned math lesson for ten months, get promoted. Some of us cheat because we know keeping a kid back, according to studies that have been done on social promotion, makes the kid stupider.

Without any fear of rebuttal, we can state the main issue in nearly every public school classroom, especially those in neighborhoods with underequipped and overwhelmed families, is student behavior. Or, put in the vernacular of teacher lunchroom chatter—how to dump the bad kids and replace them with good kids. If you don’t know that, then you haven’t taught in a bad school (sorry, University of Chicago doesn’t qualify). While you rightly slam School Choice for being an empty promise, you overlook the reason for the idea’s popularity: school people embraced School Choice because it allows the schools to pick the kids—not the other way around. And what schools want are good kids.

Best,

Recharger The Dog

Mahler makes two mistakes.
(1) He covers too much territory without the necessary connective tissue. Moby Dick was long, covered a lot of water, but the White Whale was the unifying force. This book—what’ s Mario Cuomo got to do with Reggie Jackson?(2) Mahler mutes his prose. We need here a voice like a screech of subway brakes, like the smell of a bagel in the morning, like the hottest day in July. Instead we get the New York Times. I screamed, “C’mon, Jonathan, get mad!” But, good journalist he, he kept his goddamned emotions out of it.

How can you mute the anger over the looting that accompanied the blackout? How can you make an anti-climax of Reggie’s three homeruns—three titanic orgasms ending a terrible summer (I even heard about it, and I was teaching school in Wales at the time)?

I think Mahler’s biggest problem—despite his opening disclaimer—was that he started writing a book about the Yankee’s 1977 season, and chose to widen the subject to a Summer of Sam project (no, I don’t think Spike Lee got it right—stupid, superficial movie). That’s too much territory, Jonathan. You shoulda stuck to the Blackout (an amazing subject, given the euphoric experience many of us had during the blackout three summers ago).

The next problem—forgive me, I’m a Mets fan—is that Mahler clearly thinks the Yankees are an Important Subject. I go with—and have always gone with—the axiom that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for General Motors. To keep this thesis short, let’s start with Derek Jeter—a great player who is also an ASSHOLE. Last year, this demi-god ordered security guards to eject a fan for heckling him. Way to go, Jeter, you puerile, self-aggrandizing penis-brain. Yes, the conflict between Reggie and Billy was epic, and that should have been Mahler’s hotdog—nothing else.

(I really don’t get why people like the Yankees—it’s like rooting for Nazi Germany in 1939).

I have two big memories of 1977: my trip to New York from Wisconsin (where I was attending school) with my horrible, paranoid Wisconsin girlfriend who, despite her hippie credentials, kept whining about Son of Sam shooting us. Son of Sam shooting us. My second memory was standing in a Merritt Farms (such a nice name for a place that sold only grease) on the Upper East Side when an friend walked in and said “The king is dead.” “What are you talking about?” I said. “The king is dead,” he repeated, “Elvis. He died.”

It was hot and we were surrounded by fried and battered chicken and shrimp and fish and pork chops and fries and the king was dead.

How do you capture that moment—the heat and despairing futility of a summer night in New York City during that murderous summer? I’m sure I couldn’t.
Neither did Mahler.

Legs McNeile and Gillian McCain
New York, NY

Dear Sir and Madam:

Just finished your magnificent book, Please Kill Me, and although I found it a fascinating, disturbing, ultimately-depressing page-turner, I have two problems:

First, you never explain how The Sex Pistols, a group, as I understand it, made up kids who had almost zilch musical training and craft, recorded Never Mind the Bollocks, arguably the greatest rock and roll album ever. Compared to Bollocks, Marquee Moon is pretentious and flat. That two boarding school boys made it didn’t surprise me. Yeah, I know, Richard Hell wasn’t a rich kid—doesn’t matter, that mannered, up-tight, joylessness ultimately killed punk./new wave (I’m thinking of Squeeze, B-52s, Talking Heads, lots of Elvis Costello, etc.). Even The Clash always came off as poseurs.

Second problem is Patti Smith and Lou Reed. I saw both at the Bottom Line, and both—several times—in Madison, Wisconsin. At The Bottom Line, both gave enthusiastic performances, respected the audience, played thrilling encores. In Madison (and Lou’s case, once in Milwaukee), both were assholes. Dissing the audience—for what infraction, I never figured out—playing short sets, refusing to do encores. At a Patti Smith concert, for example, she went on a diatribe against organized labor (her sound system had a few bugs, quickly fixed). Then mercilessly berated some college kids who unfurled a “We love Patti” banner in the balcony. “Did I give you permission to use my name?” she screamed. “My brother’s in the Navy and he’ll kick your asses!” Shit like that. Then she did this incredibly infantile song called “Wave” where everyone had to stand up and do a thing with their fingers ending in a wave. It was so immature.

Lou Reed’s diatribe was against people who called for oldies like “Heroin” and “Rock and Roll Animal.” Given that he was pushing Coney Island Baby at the time, I sided with the audience. He bashed kids, many of whom had paid good money to see him, traveling from as far as Chicago, for being stupid. “That’s why I hate playing these fucking places,” he said, or something to the effect that the Midwest sucked. (I’m from New York, so my beef isn’t regional).

The worst experience I had—and I wished you mentioned it—was the Elvis Costello concert I attended back in 1977. Pure sadistic paranoia. If any kid was stupid enough to leave his seat for any reason—dancing in the aisle, taking a picture—humongous thugs immediately trounced on him—it was assault, pure and simple—then dragged the unfortunate out of the theater. I kept wondering, Is this legal? These kids were doing nothing bad. And Elvis is up there, several feet away, giving a show worthy of Traffic—boring, flat, note-by-note renditions of records that I stopped listening to years ago.

It was that gratuitous assholeness—as opposed to great performers like Bruce Springsteen and The Dead and even The Violent Femmes—that killed it for me.

I don’t think being rude to people who pay your bills—the fans—make you anti-establishment; it makes you an asshole.

Still, great book (though you should have kept the original ending with the dying Jerry Nolan remembering Elvis).

Best,

Recharger the dog