Let the Great World Spin

One August morning in 1974, a tightrope walker makes his way, through the dawn light, between the World Trade Center towers. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in this stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Corrigan, a radical, young Irish monk, struggles with his demons in the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gathers in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who have died in Vietnam. Farther uptown, Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenaged daughter, determined to take care of her babies and to prove her own worth. Hailed as an American masterpiece, McCann's powerful allegory of 9/11 comes alive in the unforgettable voices of these, and other, seemingly disparate characters, drawn together by hope, beauty and the tightrope walker's "artistic crime of the century."