There are books about grief, and there are books about action, and it is rare to find one that treats the two as the same project. “Let Us Do Good” is that rare book. Frank Siller opens not with statistics or fundraising totals but with a Brooklyn morning in September 2001, when his younger brother Stephen, an off-duty FDNY firefighter, strapped on sixty pounds of gear and ran on foot through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel toward the burning towers because the tunnel had already been closed to traffic. Stephen never came home. Everything that follows in this memoir is Frank’s answer to the question every survivor eventually asks: what do you do with a loss that big?
The premise is deceptively simple. Siller traces the arc from a working-class, deeply Catholic childhood in Staten Island, through the family roofing business, through the day that ended his brother’s life, and into the founding of the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which has grown from a neighborhood tribute run into the largest builder of mortgage-free homes for catastrophically injured veterans and the families of fallen first responders in the country. He is candid that none of this was inevitable. There were years of doubt, financial strain, and the particular loneliness of being the sibling left to carry a name.
What makes the book work is Siller’s refusal to make himself the hero of it. He writes like a man still slightly surprised that people trust him with their donations and their grief, and that humility is the book’s real engine. The chapters on the foundation’s growth avoid the self-congratulation that sinks a lot of philanthropic memoirs; instead they read almost like a field manual for turning private sorrow into public good, with the kind of granular detail (a first fundraising dinner that nearly didn’t cover its own costs, the argument that led to building homes instead of just cutting checks) that makes the eventual scale feel earned rather than assumed. Faith runs through every chapter as more of a working tool than a talking point, which will land differently depending on the reader but never feels performative.
Critical response since the book’s early September release has been warm, with reviewers consistently singling out the same thing: the voice matches the man. Coverage has noted that Siller’s plainspoken sincerity, rather than polish, is what carries a story that could easily have tipped into either saccharine tribute or fundraising pitch. Some have wished for a bit more interiority in the sections covering the foundation’s more recent expansion, where the narrative occasionally speeds up into a list of accomplishments. But the consensus holds that the book earns its emotional moments because it has done the work of showing, not just the towers falling, but the two decades of unglamorous effort that followed.
“Let Us Do Good” is not a tidy book, and it doesn’t try to be. It is a brother’s account of turning the worst day of his life into a permanent institution, told without the varnish that usually comes with that kind of success. Readers looking for 9/11 history will find it here, but the book’s real subject is what comes after history, when the news cameras leave and the work of honoring the dead becomes the quiet, decades-long work of the living.
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