Reluctant Hero Book

This book was the true story of 9/11, not leaving out any of the troubling details. That is one of the things that I liked about this book, he didn't try to sugar coat it. He told like it is, raw; and that's what 9/11 still is to a lot of people, raw. It is the story of how Michael Benfante the author who escaped the North Tower of the WTC on 9/11. How he and many others became heroes with selfless acts of kindness.

This book starts out with him talking about his job and himself as well as how he met his girlfriend which is his fiancé later on in the book as well as his family. He is just a normal guy from Jersey City who now lives in New York City. He is a manager at Networks Plus on the 81^st floor at the World Trade Center. In the first chapter he just talks about how he got to his job and who he works with. In the second chapter is where all the interesting, scary and horrifying things begin to happen.

On September 11, 2o01 Michael was at work and it was a normal work day until all the sudden at 8:46 Am he hears Jim Gaffney scream “OH MY GOD!” A plane had hit the north side and Michael was located on the south side in his office. He was trying to calm everyone down and get them out. He acted quickly and remained calm. He is not sure why he remained calm but he did. He got everyone to the stairs and went back for more people that were stuck in the bathroom. As he is moving down the stairs they are moving quickly because a lot of people are not on the stairs, at least on their floor level. When he reaches the 68^th floor, Michael and John go into an office where three women were standing there and when they moved they revealed a woman in a wheelchair. He asks if she needs help and she says “yes.” John and Michael strap her to an evactuation chair. They start going down the stairs and run into a few obstacles. As they go lower and lower on the floor levels there are more and more people. They are eventually at a halt. A fireman finds them and leads them out a different way. The lady in the evacuation chair is lead to an ambulance and John and Michael go a different way which was north. Michael starts walking and a fireman comes up to him and says “Listen, if you go that way be prepared to see stuff you’ve never seen before, carnage.” Michael described in the book very visually what he heard. “Then I heard sounds unlike the others. The strangeness of the sounds-sounds so foreign that I could not relate or associated with anything in my brain could define or visualize-distracted but didn’t frighten me. …..They were loud, unpleasant thuds of singular things falling and hitting hard. I head them one, two sometimes three in a row. Then several seconds, maybe a minute, would pass, and I’d hear those sounds again.” He never looked at what the sounds were but I kept reading and found out that those sounds were bodies falling. Later on in the book he describes all the things that he went through with all the gruesome details and never knew what happened to the lady in the wheel chair. Until one day he gets a call from her and they met up.
There were some definite parts of the book that I really enjoyed and there were some parts that I didn't. I enjoyed hearing the story of what happened from start to finish on 9/11, what he experienced, what he saw, what he did and how he felt. I enjoyed reading how he dealt with it afterwards and how he felt and moved on from that day.
Overall it was an entertaining book for the most part, and will give you a good idea of what it was like to be in the towers on that day, outside of the towers when they fell and the time afterwards in which to deal with what was seen.