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Reluctant Hero: A 9/11 Survivor Speaks Out About That Unthinkable Day, What He’s Learned, How He’s Struggled, and What No One Should Ever Forget

Amazon.com Price:  $11.99 (as of 02/05/2019 20:50 PST- Details)

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Description

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Michael Benfante went to work, similar to he had every day, at his workplace at the eighty-first floor within the World Trade Center North Tower. Moments after the first plane struck, just twelve floors above him, Benfante organized his terrified employees, getting them out the workplace and moving down the stairwells. On his way down, he and any other coworker encountered a woman in a wheelchair at the sixty-eighth floor. Benfante, the woman, and Benfante’s coworker then embarked on a ninety-six-minute odyssey of escape—the two men carrying the woman down sixty-eight flights of stairs out of the North Tower and into an ambulance that rushed her to safety just minutes before the tower imploded. 

A CBS video camera caught Benfante just as he were given out of the building, and almost instantly, the national media came calling. Benfante sat at the couch with Oprah Winfrey, where she hailed him as a hero. Almost one year to the day after 9/11, Benfante were given married and the woman within the wheelchair sat within the front row.  

That’s the storybook ending. But within the aftermath of 9/11, Benfante started a journey fraught with wrenching personal challenges of very important emotional and psychological depth in Reluctant Hero. Benfante shares the trappings of his public heroism, the loneliness of his private anguish, and the hope he finds for himself and for us. Because all of us—whether we were within the towers, in New York City, or someplace else—we are all 9/11 survivors.

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