Corrigan is a gentle saver of souls, who finds his home among the prostitutes and junkies of a grim housing project. Petit’s act is mirrored by Corrigan, an Irish émigré to the Bronx who looks for his equilibrium in the most dangerous places he can find it. Briefly, his walk brought New York to a standstill: look at that! It’s a bird! No, it’s a man! Is he going to jump? What is he doing? Will he fall? Can he make it? Look, he’s actually lying down on the wire! Oh please… Among all the other chaos of that year - Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, race relations - one man held the city’s attention for a few moments with an utterly improbable feat of derring-do.Ĭolum McCann’s marvelous, boisterous 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin takes that walk and makes it the point of connection between several very different people who happened to see Petit that morning. In 1974, the aerialist Philippe Petit walked a tightrope - a cable, really - strung between the two towers of the World Trade Center.
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