![]() ![]() "It could be a curriculum vitae, a resume. The ache of knowing that dust's history, without knowing its exact origin, haunted McCann. The reactions of McCann's main characters to the stunt range from gripping fear that the tight-rope walker will fall, to disinterest or even disgust. "What I was most interested in was not so much Philip Petit but the people who were on the ground, the people who walk the sort-of little tightrope of our ordinary everyday moments," McCann says. ![]() Petit's death-defying act is familiar - it's also the subject of the documentary Man On Wire - but McCann tells Steve Inskeep that the people below were the ones whose lives he wanted to explore. The book, by Colum McCann, won the National Book Award for fiction earlier this month. The tight-rope walk is the event around which a new novel, Let the Great World Spin, revolves. He danced, ran and lay down, performing for the crowd that had gathered more than 100 stories below his feet, before dismounting into the custody of New York police officers. That morning, Philippe Petit crossed a wire stretched between the towers eight times. On a gray morning in August 1974, a man stepped off the edge of the yet-to-be completed World Trade Center and into history. ![]()
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