Sixteen Acres

A look at the collision of interests behind the ambitious attempt to raise a new national icon at Ground Zero. Critic Philip Nobel strips away the hyperbole to reveal the secret life of the century's most charged building project. Providing a tally of deceptions and betrayals, a look at the meaning of events beyond the pieties of the moment, and a running bestiary of the main players--developers and bureaucrats, star architects and amateur fantasists, politicians and the well-spun press--Nobel's book bares the crucial moments as factions and institutions converge to create a noisy new culture at Ground Zero. Tragic and comic by turns, full of low dealings and high dudgeon, this book takes us behind the scenes at a site in search of its sanctity, exposing the reconstruction as the flawed product of a complicated city: driven by money, hamstrung by politics, burdened by the wounds it is somehow supposed to heal.