What Is Life Worth?: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Fund and Its Effort to Compensate the Victims of September 11th

Everyone has a story from that day. I was a sophomore in high school. Old enough to know something historic was happening, yet too juvenile to understand its impact. Things changed after September 11, 200, but I was maturing alongside those changes. I am on the cusps of two generations. The older generation can see and feel how the world changed after that day. The younger generation simply sees 9/11 as a matter of fact, inevitable part of history. For better or for worst I get to see both sides.Pain is a funny thing. I have tried studying it psychologically, physically, medically, and theologically. We all experience it and respond to it differently. Collective grief can be even worse.The nation grieved on September 11. We were the most advanced country in the world and our greatest city was attacked by a few radicalized men. It was a gut punch to our psyche.As a country, we needed to act fast. Not just in defending our borders and interests, we needed to bounce back emotionally. Suddenly our cities, local governments, infrastructure, transportation industry, and more were vulnerable. To save these entities, Congress needed to act. In a nutshell, Congress decided to provide limitations on litigations against certain industries. In order not to upset potential claimants, Congress provided billions of dollars to be bestowed to victim’s families.In their rush, Congress did not set a lot of restrictions on the money. Enter Kenneth Feinberg. He was appointed special master of the fund by the Attorney General. This book is about Feinberg’s journey.This is book is a quick read. I was hoping to learn more about the process of allotting the funds but instead, I learned more about the tumultuous journey of Feinberg. While a nation grieved and victim’s families wailed, he had a find a dollar amount. That’s not easy. Obviously, no dollar amount can bring back a human life, but helping the victim’s legacy move forward through their family was the goal.Feinberg was in a lose-lose situation and somehow he won.

How do you distribute $7 billion to the surviving victims of 9/11 in such a way that 97% of those eligible accepted their awards with peace and understanding rather than anger or bitterness? The author undertook this seemingly impossible task, adjudicating a statute he knew from the beginning was deeply flawed, if not a total minefield of potential congressional overreach. But Feinberg expertly navigates the full range of responses: inconsolable sorrow, pain, anger and intransigence, handling them all with the patience and evenhandedness of a combination social worker, religious confessor and hostage negotiator. The book is a testament to how government can get it right - when the right man is put in charge, that is. Oh and by the way, the successful settlement probably saved the entire airline industry from being litigated into extinction.

I've met Mr. Feinberg a few times, casually and briefly, and although my favorable impression of him didn't influenced those I formed of his book while reading it, that impression did remove the sting of cynicism I'd almost certainly have brought to reading a stranger's account of a program that I thought was bad law.In the days following the 9/11 murders, congress wrote and President Bush signed into law the victim compensation fund, giving monetary awards to anyone who was killed or injured at the Pentagon or World Trade Center. The fund was created to protect the US economy by encouraging a return to business as usual and discouraging litigation against industry. There had been nothing like it in US law before. Congress set no limit on the awards, the special master had sole responsible in administering the fund, and the amounts were largely unregulated. Mr. Feinberg, former counsel to Ted Kennedy in his role on the Senate Judiciary committee, interviewed with attorney general John Ashcroft who gave him the job.I'll let the reader discover for himself the details given of the administration of the fund because that's not the heart of the book, its soul, although historians and legal professionals are repaid for reading it. The soul of the book is part of Mr. Feinberg's own. `What's a Life Worth?' refers both to Mr. Feinberg's account of his prosecution of the role of special master determining the dollar amount awarded for each death or injury and his unfavorable opinion of the law's precedent, and the reflection his work caused him to make on the nature of life in America and a person's role in it. It's a part of the public record and a keen legal brief, as well as a discourse on the unique way of life Americans enjoy and reminder that each of us is part of the life of others and we have a role to play in public and private. Sitting here, typing this out, I suddenly realized that this is the most patriotic book I've read in years.`What's a Life Worth'? will be read and referred to, with admiration, long after the story of 9/11 stops being part of living memory and the faces of the murderers forgotten or placed as bogeys in text books along with John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald. I'll vouch for the veracity of the man who wrote it and the genius for simplicity he brought to his role of special master and his philosophy, that work and life he shares with us here.

There should be no amount of money out on a human life . No money will being back loved ones. This book was very complex reading, heart breaking stories of the 9/11 terrorists attacks that should never have happened. The countless numbers who either dead or badly injured you can't put a price on them. It won't make their injuries or loss any the less better. Why should one worker get more than another in a lower paid job. I feel they should all get the same amount of money.Life has no price. You can't bring but a life back. No amount of money can change what happened on 9/11 2001. I strongly recommend people to pick up this book and read it and come to your own conclusions.

The cover was damaged when it's delivered. Very disappointed.