America /Firehouse

FIREHOUSE

DAVID HALBERSTAM, ©2002 ​
Firehouse takes us to the epicenter of the tragedy. On the morning of September 11, 2001, two rigs carrying thirteen men set out from this firehouse: twelve of them would never return. Through the kind of intimate portraits that are Halberstam's trademark, we watch the day unfold—the men called to duty while their families wait anxiously for news of them. In addition, we come to understand the culture of the firehouse itself: why gifted men do this; why, in so many instances, they are eager to follow in their fathers' footsteps and serve in so dangerous a profession; and why, more than anything else, it is not just a job, but a calling.

NOTABLE QUOTES

Robert Kennedy was in many ways the most interesting figure in American politics, not only because he was a Kennedy, not only because so much of his education had taken place in the public eye--it could be traced by putting together film clips of this decade--but primarily because he was a transitional figure in a transitional year.  At a time of great flux in American life and politics, with old laws on the way out and new laws on the way in, Robert Kennedy was at exactly the halfway mark between the old and the new..

-The Unfinished Odyssey, page 40

A terrible beauty was born with the death of Robert Kennedy.  It surrounds and suffuses the hard intelligence of this poignant and powerful memoir

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

RELATED READS

REVIEWS

Kirkus Review
June 2002

The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

Peeled emotional energy characterizes this portrait by Halberstamof a firehouse that lost 12 of 13 men in the initial response to the World Trade Center attack.It’s a difficult story to tell from almost every angle. The notoriously insular firefighting community doesn't accept strangers in its midst, let alone confide in an outsider, and most of the subjects are dead. Halberstam is striving to achieve sympathetic yet realistic characterizations of men he never met, most of whom were very young. So it’s quite an achievement that the author manages to get into the soul of Engine 40, Ladder 35, to give a glimpse of what it meant for these men to be firefighters. He nails the pride and purposefulness with which firefighters view their work, and how that sense of mission and honor melded the house into a family—a word that is not a metaphor here, since more than once the author informs us that someone was “a fireman's son and a fireman's grandson,” with brothers and cousins thrown into the act. The profession’s unique requirements, norms, and traditions seem to have passed through the generations like some DNA-driven imperative to create firefighters’ preternatural calm, their selflessness, and their simple, extraordinary willingness to troop straight into danger while others are streaming away from it. Although the firehouse is a raw, exposed environment (“everyone knows everything about everyone, and therefore nothing can be faked”), it’s not easy to draw out these men to speak of their dead comrades. Understandably, some portraits are more rounded than others, but only a few are pastiches of impressions that fail to jell. More often, the descriptions click, Halberstam succeeds in bringing his subjects back to life, and we ache as we suddenly remember that this man is no more.
Fine work that will leave most readers with even higher esteem for firefighters.
The New York Review, John Phillips
August 21, 1969

Bobby

Each of these mournful books is written deep in Bobby’s thrall, and that is as it has to be. Two of them present Eugene McCarthy as pretty much the thoroughgoing baddy Bobby thought he was. All three are sentimental memoirs. David Halberstam often appears to be striving for a stiff-upperlip poignancy that has been suggested in a Yeatsian jacket blurb awarded him by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. [Full Review]

EMAIL YOUR REVIEWS IN TODAY

WE PUBLISH SELECT REVIEWS SUBMITTED TO US IN OUR DISCRETION.

David Halberstam

© 2020