New York's Bravest: Eight Decades of Photographs from the Daily News
The world discovered New York's firefighters in the thick of  their department's greatest single loss and paradoxically one of  its greatest achievements-the evacuation of thousands from the  burning Trade Center towers. But the courage and skill displayed  last September were, argues Golway, the culmination of three  centuries of firefighting culture developed doing hazardous work  in an increasingly vertical city. Golway is city editor and  columnist for the New York Observer and coauthor of The Irish in  America, but more to the point for this moving history, he is  the son and grandson of New York City firemen and no stranger to  the "culture of firefighting." In So Others Might Live, the  first full history of the FDNY in 60 years, Golway shows the  department's emergence from amateur bucket brigades into the  beginnings of a specialized force and up to the present, never  letting a memorable figure or vivid moment escape his narrative.  The book is simultaneously a social history of the changing city  and a dramatic record of the disasters that have assaulted and  periodically reshaped it: Manhattan's great fire of 1776 made  thousands homeless and leveled a quarter of the city's  structures, for instance, while city firefighters played a  crucial role during America's worst riot-the draft riots of  1863-before establishing New York's first professional force two  years later.   Golway's narrative updates a classic history by Costello, Our  Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Departments Volunteer  and Paid, originally published in 1887 and now abridged and  republished under a new name. Costello delivers all the sooty  romantic lore in high style ("Onward, still onward, swept the  fiery bosom of destruction") while detailing the evolution of a  firefighting force that is the recognizable progenitor of the  one that rushed up into the burning towers. Another worthy  companion to Golway's book is New York's Bravest: Eight Decades  of Photographs from the Daily News, which records 80 years of  New York firefighting through 166 pages of dramatic picture  stories-children plucked breathlessly from harm, a building  transformed by hosing during a winter fire into a glittering ice  palace, the seven-alarm blaze caused by a jet collision over  Brooklyn in December 1960-that have been the life's blood of the  photo tabloid since its creation in 1919. The book concludes  with the department's worst fire of all. "It has been more than  two centuries since Benjamin Franklin wrote of the love  firefighters had for each other," Golway observes in So Others  Might Live. "In the ruins of the Twin Towers, in the memorials  for the fallen, in the embraces and salutes and unchanged  rituals, the world saw the power of that love."-Nathan Ward,  "Library Journal"Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.