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By Rudolph Giuliani and Ken Kurson

Miramax, 2002

Three thousand years from now it will become fashionable for up-and-comers to discuss a lengthy (407 pages if printed) document by an ancient mayor of Earth’s New York City whose incumbency included a terrorist attack on that metropolis. Status points will be scored at after-work gatherings with comments such as:

“Did you know the leaders from planet Ebizuddus used knowledge from this ancient ‘Leadership’ document to win the intergalactic intellect derby?”

“Amongst all the horrible carnage in this document there are fantastic kernels of knowledge for bettering yourself.”

“This Mayor Giuliani should have made quantitative analytics his vocation, as there are so many statistics in this work.”

In other words, Giuliani’s Leadership in three millennia will be what Sun Tzu’s ancient text Art of War has been for the past century. His rules of leadership are basic and strong. They are encoded within compelling narration of Giuliani’s life, and especially his extraordinary heroics on Sept. 11, 2001 and the months that followed.

If this book were written by anyone else, he or she would be subject to allegations of boastfulness. But if anyone involved in leading the United States after 9/11 has a right to tell his story, it is New York City’s former mayor. While the Secret Service had the U.S. president crisscrossing the country to avoid a possible attack, the vice president was rushed into hiding and elected officials and bureaucrats in Washington were running from D.C. like rats from a burning barn, the one person who stood before the media and talked sense to the country was Rudy Giuliani. Ironically, of all the above, he was the one to be perilously close to the actual destruction when it happened. He deserves all the accolades he and his book might garner, now and in the year 5000.