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The heartbreaking yet heartwarming story of one of the World Trade Center survivors.
Bantam
August 2002
352 pages
ISBN: 055338189X
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, Lauren Manning-a
wife, the mother of a ten-month-old son, and a senior vice
president and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald-came to work, as
always, at One World Trade Center. As she stepped into the
lobby, a fireball exploded from the elevator shaft, and in
that split second her life was changed forever. Lauren was burned over 82.5 percent of her body. As he
watched his wife lie in a drug-induced coma in the ICU of
the Burn Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Greg
Manning began writing a daily journal. In the form of
e-mails to family, friends, and colleagues, he recorded
Lauren�s harrowing struggle-and his own tormented efforts to
make sense of an act that defies all understanding. This
book is that e-mail diary: detailed, intimate, inspiring
messages that end, always, as if a prayer for a happy outcome: LOVE, GREG & LAUREN We share this story day by astonishing day. Greg writes of
the intricate surgeries, the painful therapies, and the
constant risk of infection Lauren endured. Through his eyes
we come to know the doctors, nurses, aides, and therapists
who cared for her around the clock with untiring devotion
and sensitivity. We also come to know the families with whom
he shared wrenching hospital vigils for their own loved ones
who were waging a battle that some would not win. It was, most of all, Greg�s belief that Lauren would win her
brave fight for life that kept him writing. Through his eyes
we see what she could not-their toddler�s first steps, the
video of his first birthday party, the compassionate
messages of hope from around the world. And we are there as
Lauren gradually emerges into awareness, signaling first
with her eyes, then with smiles, her understanding of the
words Greg speaks to her, the poems he recites, the songs he
plays. Most miraculously, we are there when Lauren walks out of the
Burn Center. The world knows all too well both the nightmare and the
heroism that have marked this terrible time in history. But
no account of September 11 matches the astonishing personal
story Greg Manning records in these spontaneous and
heartfelt pages. It is a story that invites us to share,
e-mail after e-mail, the perilous course of a mortally
wounded woman who by sheer will and courage emerges from
near death because she is determined to live for her husband
and her son. And it is equally the story of a man who, as he
stays by her side through these long weeks and months,
discovers anew the depth of his love and admiration for the
woman who becomes his hero.
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