9/12 is the saga of the epic nine-year legal battle waged by William H. Groner against the City of New York and its contractors on behalf of the more than ten thousand first responders who became ill as a result of working on the Ground Zero cleanup. These first responders - like AT&T Disaster Relief head Gary Acker and New York Police Department detectives Candiace Baker, Thomas Ryan, and Mindy Hersh - rushed to Ground Zero and remained to work on the rescue and recovery mission, which lasted for the next nine months. Their selfless bravery and humanity were rewarded with horrible health issues resulting from the toxic stew of chemicals present in the dust and debris that government officials such as Mayor Rudy Giuliani and EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman had assured them was safe. Groner, a lead attorney in the mass tort litigation, fought for their illnesses to be acknowledged and for them to receive validation and closure, as well as for compensation - an eventual aggregate award of more than $800 million. As detailed in 9/12, the battle for the Ground Zero responders was waged not only in the courtroom but also in the press, in medical and scientific research centers, and among politicians at the local, state, and federal levels, as well as in the halls of Congress to pass the Zadroga Health and Compensation Act. 9/12 weaves together Groner's firsthand account with glimpses into the first responders' lives as they try to understand and overcome their illnesses. The result is an intimate look into their battles - physical, mental, and legal - that will leave you cheering for these heroes who, in spite of everything, would do it all again. Told by Groner and journalist Tom Teicholz, 9/12 is the story of the brave public servants who showed up when their country needed them most, of their fight for redress, and of their victory in the face of the seemingly insurmountable.

The interviews in this collection will convince the reader that Jerzy Kosinski's public persona was one of the greatest creations. Few authors were ever more adept at press interviews. For Kosinski, the author of nine novels, including "The Painted Bird, Steps, Being There," and "The Hermit of 69th Street," the interview was part performance, part public relations, part blind date. Kosinski in person was different from the existential adventurer in his novels. He was not so much engaged as engaging. though his fiction was brutal, he was charming. The contrast between Kosinski and the intensity of his fiction created the backdrop for his interviews.

Like his readers, Kosinski's interviews were obsessed with the facts of his life. As a young boy he survived the Holocaust. He escaped Communist Poland. His life became the stuff of novels. He came to the United States with little money and no command of the English, but within a year he was a Ford Fellow at Columbia University and not long afterward was married to an American heiress and was living on Park Avenue. Yet Kosinski felt that his unique experiences, when transmuted to fiction, became a didactic lesson for others. "A human being is loaded with the greatest power," he says in one interview, "his imagination and the power to transcend his own conditions."

The interviews here are published chronologically without abridgement. The same questions recur and Kosinski's answers are filled with discrepancies and contradictions. "A good interview," he once wrote, "is like truth itself, the temporary resolution of various contradictions." These compelling conversations recapture part of Jerzy Kposinski, who took his own life on May 3, 1991.

What a pleasure this book affords In these pages one of the delights of sophisticated conversation lives again. The interviews collected in this book comprise a treasury of wit. Perelman (1904-1979) was one of America's best writers and, undeniably, one of its wittiest talkers. His great ability to take the tired English language and make it new and shiny was perhaps his most amazing feat. For his seemingly effortless contributions to the world of humor and to an avid, exhilarated readership flourishing over six decades the "New York Times Book Review" declared him a national treasure.Although he quipped that by profession he was "a "feuilletonist," 'a maker of little leaves," in these interviews Perelman is repeatedly reminded that he is a clever genius, but he never divulges what makes him thus. Spanning his entire career, these conversations show that from the beginning he was a unique practitioner and a professional curmudgeon. He discusses his progress from youthful cartoonist to comic writer. He amuses listeners with accounts of hilarious adventures in Hollywood working with the Marx Brothers and later with Mike Todd on "Around the World in Eighty Days," for which Perelman won an Academy Award for scriptwriting.His books--"Baby, It's Cold Outside, Chicken Inspector #23, The Rising Gorge, Crazy Like a Fox, " and others--showed the master's touch, his play with words, and his inexhaustible store of humor. His style he characterized as "a mixture of all the trash I read as a child, all the cliches, criminal slang, liberal doses of Yiddish, and some of what I learned in school from impatient teachers." But a better description was proffered by William Shawn, the editor of "The New Yorker," who said, "He was a master of the English language, and no one had put the language to more stunning comic effect than he did.""