Nonetheless, as Silverstein details in the memoir, numerous politicians and the Port Authority repeatedly tried to buy him out or otherwise lessen his influence over the planning process. Even those of us who dislike Giuliani and mistrust the Port Authority may be inclined to question whether a single wealthy individual should have exerted so much control over a publicly owned site of grave significance.

Another of Silverstein’s aims in the book is to address this skepticism. In contrast to the corrupt and wasteful Port Authority, Silverstein presents himself as hard-nosed, capable, and committed to the project out of civic duty. “No one seemed to understand that after 9/11 my involvement with the Trade Center was not primarily about money or profit,” he writes. “I was determined to show the people who had attacked America that we don’t give up. That we rebuild.”

Silverstein is not much of a memoirist. His retelling is heavy on trite grandstanding and light on evidence of introspection. Readers will have trouble believing that profit was as far from his mind as he suggests, and it is difficult to take his complaints about the Port Authority’s misuse of taxpayer money seriously when another of his gripes with the agency was its reluctance to guarantee loans for his commercial towers, or when he later brags of negotiating a lopsided agreement that required the authority to fund the luxe shopping center in the base of 3 World Trade Center. Rather, The Rising is most interesting when it affords insight into how Silverstein and his partners approached valuing buildings, structuring financial agreements, and engaging in difficult multiparty negotiations—when, that is, it sticks to the mechanics of real estate.

And what of the complex that emerged from the arduous process described in this book—the collection of Silverstein-developed offices, the Port Authority–developed One World Trade Center (formerly known as the Freedom Tower) by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Santiago Calatrava’s stegosaurus-like PATH station, the vast memorial pools, the marble-clad mausoleum that is the Perelman Performing Arts Center, and everything else that now stands at Ground Zero? Silverstein justifiably takes pride in such successes as the shimmering 7 World Trade Center (also by SOM). But when he concludes that the complex is a “better version of New York,” it’s difficult not to reflect on all the money spent and the two decades of bitter wrangling between Silverstein, the authority, and other interested parties, and wonder: is this really the best we could have done?