Man on Wire
The basis for the motion picture: "By evoking his youthful passion for the World Trade Center, Petit brings the towers' awesomeness back to life." —San Francisco Chronicle More than a quarter-century before September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center was immortalized by an act of unprecedented daring and beauty. In August 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit boldly—and illegally—fixed a rope between the tops of the still-young Twin Towers, a quarter mile off the ground. At daybreak, thousands of spectators gathered to watch in awe and adulation as he traversed the rope a full eight times in the course of an hour. In Man on Wire, Petit recounts the six years he spent preparing for this achievement. It is a fitting tribute to those lost-but-not-forgotten symbols of human aspiration—the Twin Towers.
Product Details
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
On the morning of August 7, 1974 having already illegally rigged and walked steel cables between the towers of Notre Dame in Paris and Australia's Sydney Harbor Bridge French funambulist Petit illegally rigged 200 feet of 7/8" steel cable between the two World Trade Center towers and walked between them repeatedly, lying down at one point and making eight crossings in all. This incredible feat resulted from six years of obsessive planning and problem-solving, meticulously documented in this engrossing, truly exhilarating account of how he pulled it off. Petit has penned four previous books in French regaling his various exploits, and here establishes an elegantly energetic and quirkily poetic English as he tells of secretly (and benignly) casing the World Trade Center, assembling his team of helpers for the enormously complicated (and improvised) rigging job, getting the heavy cable and rigging tools to the roof, running the wire across in the dead of night (via an arrow shot between the towers!), and tightening the cable: "Even in the midst of the hardest rigging job or most demanding clandestine adventure, I never fail to pause and admire the moment when tension brings my cable to what I consider its most seductive shape. Then I pause and smile back." The way in which the walk itself stopped traffic and galvanized the city is captured in Petit's descriptions and the 140 b&w photos (including Petit's notebook sketches), a most fitting remembrance of the World Trade Center as a piece of New York social architecture. The spirit behind Petit's form of trespass undertaken with enormous care, to the point of wrapping the rigging in carpet so it would not damage the towers acts directly against the violation of the city's structures and the murder of its people.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
On August 7, 1974, French funambulist Petit, then 24, performed an astonishing high-wire act on a cable that he and his accomplices had surreptitiously rigged between the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. In short, predominantly one-page chapters, Petit details the entire adventure, from its inception in a Parisian dentist's office in 1968 through his hour-long aerial feat of eight trips across the cable, 1350 feet above the ground, while more than 100,000 New Yorkers watched. Wonderfully documented are the assemblage of his confederates, the innumerable covert trips to the towers, the exhaustive planning, and, especially, the seemingly endless frustrations, problems, fights, and difficulties throughout the six-year period that led up to the "artistic crime of the century." Part Houdini, part Evil Kneivel, Petit is certainly fascinating; if his prose sags a little under the weight of too many exclamatory and interrogative sentences and hyperbolic tropes, he is to be forgiven; after all, he spent an hour suspended between heaven and earth. The 140 drawings and photographs are by Petit and his comrades and tend to be a bit amateurish, but they do give readers an idea of just how audacious a feat it was. Essential. Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
Every time I watch Philippe Petit perform, my heart beats a mile a minute, and I wonder, awe-inspiring as are his accomplishments on the wire. (Milos Forman )
It was Philippe Petit who connected the twin towers of the World Trade Center, in an act of beauty and ecstasy. Now that an act of terror has destroyed them both, his book resurrects and reunites them, in sheer defiance of gravity. (Werner Herzog )
One year after the nightmares of September 11, how good to remember that morning in 1974 when a young man gave New York a gift of astonishing, indelible beauty. How good that he has sat down now to give us this lively and often heart-stopping account of how he achieved his masterpiece. (Paul Auster )
Philippe Petit planned and executed the perfect crime by walking on a high wire between the twin towers, and the whole world loved him for doing it. --Guy F. Tozzoli, President, World Trade Centers Association
Customer Reviews
clubikon
Man On Wire is a great memoir/diary by French street artist Philippe Petit documenting his legendary walk on wire between the North and South towers of the WTC in 1974. The book is very different from the film directed by James Marsh. It is more like an epic poem intertwining emotions with facts, inspirations with cynicism, philosophy with gossips. The book takes you on an emotional roller coaster. Just imagine he spent two pages on "The First Step" alone.
"On the one side, the mass of a mountain, a life I know."
"On the other, the universe of the clouds, so full of unknown that it feels empty to us. Too much space."
"Between the two, a thin line on which my being hesitates to distribute whatever strength it has left."
While the movie is treated like a detective, heist story, the book is much deeper in its social, philosophic, and personal approach in the understanding of his obsession with the WTC. It brought me back to nostalgia of the seventies, of the passion and purity of life back then, when the young, genius, and idealists could truly realized their dreams and ideology out of the conviction that nothing is impossible.
"The wire is always ready to kill me by surprise,..."
Philippe Petit shaped his story with guidance from Marlon Brando: "By practicing the discipline of self-imposed intellectual immobility -- akin to the stillness Marlon calls for -- I was able to apprehend the essence of each chapter before I drafted it. My pen learned to perceive what lurked on the other side of the action it was busy describing until, like him, I could declare, I can see a smile in the dark."
It's extraordinary how well Petit learned this lesson.
"His back to the void my friend climbs down the channel girts like a terrified snail. On the ledge area, he helps me while staying under the protectin of the inclined columns, as far away as possible -- that is, 35 inches! -- from the 1,350 foot drop.
"I bump into Jean-Francois. I knock him over. He is in my way.
"I shove him; he is too slow.
"I encircle him in a dance of frenzy, allowing him no time to understand he's toiling -- against his will -- between life and death."
After the walk and under arrest:
"I scream, 'Five seconds! Let me talk for five seconds! About the cable ... Something terribly dangerous can happen with the rigging! ... It's imperative I loosen the tension on the cable. Right now, there's three point four tons, but if the towers sway, the tension will reach a terrible load and my cable will break ... you'll get a giant whiplash: some of us on this roof will be cut in half, and the explosion will hurl large pieces of steel into the void defacing the building and killing quite a few people in the streets."
It's perhaps churlish to mention that the towers could have swayed at any time during the walk, as well, with the consequences Petit describes to other people and to the buildings. But Petit is often indifferent to his effect on others: "I send Annie back to France. I don't want anything to dull the splendor of my newfound fame, to slow the unrestrained and joyous tempo of my new beginning."
Artistic license, but very cold behaviour to a person who was essential to his successes and wonderfully supportive for many years.
The typography of the book matches the elegance and power of the text. The paragraphs are set narrowly, with wide margins of white on all sides mirroring the image of Philippe Petit on the wire. The photographs of ancillary materials are in a washed out black and white matching the only available images of the walk itself.
Petit brought his preparations, the walk, the aftermath alive. I was amazed at the terror I felt during so many passages in this book. This is literature of a very high order, and very, very effective.
Robert C. Ross 2009
The First Time New Yorkers looked up at the Twin Towers in disbelief.
I have been living near the Twin Towers for over 30 years, and try as I did, I always had to go into length about Minoru Yamasaki's wondrous structure that architects loved to hate. Imagine my joy when someone comes to the rescue and captures the awe I saw since I stood at the base of the Twin Towers as a child and looked up, up, and up. The sheer simplicity, overstretched grandeur, and minimalist repetition can only be brought to scale by a man whose dreams supersedes his size.
Sure, you can read about it in Wikipedia, but under the watchful, crafty pen of Philippe Petit, you will be taken on a true journey from conception to realization. We begin with Petit's background as a child in France, learning pickpocketing, fencing, horseriding, painting, juggling, tightrope walking, and magic tricks. After being thrown out of five schools, we grasp that our author has a penchant for defying authority, one that sends him, inevitably, on a crash course with the New York Port Authority the day he set eyes on the Twin Towers.
Over six years in planning, with an endless list of accomplices (the cheery, angelic Jean Francois is an absolute delight) from both sides of the pond, Petit's daredevil tightrope walk across the near complete Twin Towers (World Trade Center 1 & 2) arrived only after several attempts to penetrate security, coordinate assistants, and gather all the necessary tools to be smuggled onto site.
Even though a coffee-table book in appearance, To Reach The Clouds is built masterfully, taut with suspense, gaining in momentum, only to be surprised by setbacks, followed by a surge. The format of storytelling here is analogous to the rollercoaster nature of inspiration for every artist.
A virtuoso narrative passage occurs in the sequence on the night before the big morning of the walk. Operating without any light, the accomplices and Petit illegally make their way to the roofs of the world, only to work in total darkness. After pages and pages of black and white photos, blueprints, snapshots, and a stock image or two of construction equipment, the photos all but disappear for a passage of 30 pages. If Petit has to work in the dark, so do we, the readers. And the moment dawn arrives, the first photograph appears. Wonderful! It's almost as if we, the readers are right there at the crack of dawn.
A very emotional picture occurs on Page 184, in the snapshot of New Yorkers gawking up in disbelief. Having lived through both attacks on my favorite skyscrapers when man's hate and his religion destroyed, it is truly breathtaking to see what man and his art instead, can inspire.
I found it puzzling that someone gave this book a 1 star. Petit is not nasty. A rebellious individual who pits nerves against the unforeseen disappointments of the creative endeavor can be forgiven for being short once in a while, but Petit does take the time, for example, to think of the lives of construction workers and tighten the cables of their platforms even at his most stressed moment. He thanks even the people who abandoned him before his walk, reasoning that without their help (however incomplete it may have been) he would have never arrived at his destination.
He also offers a beautiful historical story of the collapse of the San Marco tower in 1902 as an afterward to 9/11, and also a promise to walk across the structure that will stand where the World Trade Center once stood. Even if that day doesn't arrive, Petit and this book has already given us the privilege to have a beautiful and lasting memory when we think about the World Trade Center. Thank You Philippe.
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