What Is Life Worth?

Starred review from May 30, 2005
When Feinberg writes that "he cacophony of arguments validated my original preference: to refuse to evaluate individual suffering" midway through this frank memoir, the reader already trusts him enough to know that he is not being crass or unfeeling: he is being honest. By then, Feinberg, a lawyer who has been on two presidential commissions and has done Agent Orange litigation, has established his judicious forthrightness and his dedication to "the success of the fund"—getting as many families as possible to opt in to the trust, which he headed and which was established to award cash to the 9/11 victims, rather than sue the government. The problem: how, and how much? Feinberg's willingness to put himself into the book makes what could have been an alternately dry and self-serving case study crackle with care, frustration, intellectual energy and good writing. Feinberg and his team ran through every argument and counterargument for compensation and its various possible permutations, and he presents the debate, and his ultimate conclusions as head of the 9/11 fund, with an earned conviction and clarity, even on stat-heavy pages. With its combination of a strong personality, undeniably compelling subject matter and a great title, this understated, passionate trek into the dismal terrain is likely to be a major surprise bestseller. Anything but macabre, it ends up, in its own way, celebrating life.

June 1, 2005
Feinberg's experience as an attorney and a mediator, having mediated the suit between Vietnam vets and manufacturers of Agent Orange, made him uniquely qualified to handle the delicate task of compensating families victimized by the 9/11 terrorist attack and reducing the prospects for lawsuits against the airlines and the U.S. government. But his experiences did not prepare him for the emotional toll of the unprecedented task. In this personal account, Feinberg calls his charge one of the most harrowing yet rewarding experiences of his life. For 32 months, he tried to "fill the hole in a family's life with money," attempting to bring some fairness to settlements for the families of wealthy stockbrokers, middle-class firemen and policemen, and immigrant restaurant workers. What Feinberg struggled with most was the awesome task of deciding the value of human life, acknowledging his own clumsy insensitivity at the beginning, and gradually learning to deal with grieving families who wanted as much to be heard as to be compensated.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)