The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein

When the book first came out, I shared it with fifth grade classes at Joyce Kilmer School in Milltown, NJ. A love story to the Twin Towers, this true, bittersweet, life-affirming tribute, winner of the 2004 Caldecott Medal, will inspire gasps of disbelief from readers. Gerstein's detailed blue-infused paintings of the towers from Petit's perspective up high and from incredulous spectators in the streets below are masterful and breathtaking, with two fold-out three-paneled views of New York City that will give you vertigo. For nearly an hour he mesmerized people below, running, dancing, kneeling, and even lying down upon the wire, all the while eluding the police on the roof, bellowing into bullhorns, 'You're under arrest!'

At just past dawn on August 7, 1974, 24-year-old French aerialist, Philippe Petit, stepped out onto the wire with his twenty-eight foot balancing pole. How did they get the cable from the top of one building to the other? They tied it to an arrow and shot it across with a bow. With the help of friends, in the middle of the night, he sneaked to the roof and stretched a cable seven-eighths of an inch thick and 140 feet long between the tops of the just completed towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Now he began to plan how he could carry out a startling new feat.

He had already walked a wire between the steeples of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. One thousand three hundred and forty feet.Ī young street performer who 'loved to walk and dance on a rope he tied between two trees' looked at the Twin Towers and got an idea. 'Once there were two towers side by side.

The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein