Engine 26: A Story of Loss, Duty and Memory

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Daniel Ross

Some books exist because a story needs to be told. This one exists because a promise needed to be kept. Mary Farino-Thomas lost her husband Tom on September 11, 2001. He was Captain of Engine 26, FDNY, and he died in the World Trade Center doing exactly what he had devoted his life to doing. Twenty-five years later, she wrote this book. The time it took her to get here is itself part of the story.

Reading Engine 26 requires a particular kind of stillness. This is not a book you rush through. It is a book that asks you to sit with the full weight of what it is describing, the loss of a man, a father, a captain, a husband, and the decades of carrying that loss forward while still showing up for two children, for a community, for the memory of someone who cannot speak for himself anymore. Mary does that carrying with extraordinary grace, and co-author Robert Trotta helps her shape it into something that honors both the personal and the historical without letting either one diminish the other.

What makes the book so quietly devastating is the specificity. Not just the events of that morning, but who Tom Farino was on the mornings before it. The man who attended Msgr. McClancy Memorial High School with high honors. Who went to John Jay College and studied Police Science. Who encouraged his children Jane and James to always do their best and not be afraid to challenge themselves. These details are not background. They are the whole point. The country lost a hero on September 11th. Mary and her children lost a father and a husband, and those are not the same grief even when they happen to the same person.

The title is not just a number. Engine 26 is a place, a community, a tradition of service that Tom Farino embodied and that this book ensures will not be forgotten.

For anyone who believes that remembering is itself an act of love, this book is one of the most moving expressions of that belief you will ever read.