Books About the World Trade Center and the Traces Left Collection of the 9/11 Memorial Museum Artifacts from 9/11: shoes worn by a woman on her walk from a tower to safety; a the helmet of a firefighter; a victim's wallet and wedding ring. It took 20 years to complete the Pearl Harbor memorial, so maybe New Yorkers should be grateful that the World Trade Center and its memorial museum are almost finished as we approach the 12th anniversary of Sept. In "Battle for Ground Zero: Inside the Political Struggle to Rebuild the World Trade Center" (Palgrave Macmillan, $28), Elizabeth Greenspan, an urban anthropologist, vividly recounts the dysfunctional process and controversies that put her favorite graffiti, "America the Re-build-iful," to a grueling test that is only now about to be graded by the public. She came to ground zero as a 24-year-old graduate student with a simple premise: "The idea that the identity of the country was inextricably tied to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site." Over the ensuing years, Ms. Greenspan interviewed hundreds of workers and visitors at the site, downtown residents and city and state officials. She explored often unflattering turf wars that pitted visionaries against realists, and survivors and the relatives of victims against public officials with broader agendas and constituencies, and a mayor against a governor. She pondered the big questions that vexed them: Should there be a memorial, an International Freedom Center, a nearby Islamic center? How should the needs of victims" families be balanced against those of ordinary visitors? Should anything have been built at all? Twelve years and $15 billion later, with the opening of the museum now delayed until next year and with human remains still being excavated, Ms. Greenspan, who teaches at Harvard, has produced a valuable and highly accessible primer for everyone who wants to better understand how government works and why it does not. "The Stories They Tell: Artifacts from the National September 11 Memorial Museum" (Skira Rizzoli, $19.95, paper) delves behind ephemera collected from the site to produce a curatorial record of why the objects were selected for display and what they reveal. This tasteful and enlightening book, by Clifford Chanin and Alice M. Greenwald, two museum executives, ranges over crushed fire trucks to personal artifacts, like a crumpled $2 bill, that bring dark memories and heartening heroics to life. The museum, Ms. Greenwald writes, "is a place to learn history in the very location where the events took place." The journey to the bedrock, seven stories down, passes remnants of the fallen towers, which she writes "stand as touchstones, embodying collective memory and inviting an encounter with the authentic." Tributes to Central Park usually focus on its stunning vistas: the Sheep Meadow strewed with sunbathers, the Midtown skyline towering over the reservoir. But in "Central Park NYC: An Architectural View" (Rizzoli, $75), the artist-authors Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams explore the park's multitude of overlooked smaller structures, statues, benches and bridges. Their original watercolors and photographs and revealing text redefine the coffee table book: More than just pretty pictures to be savored, these images will enrich and deepen the reader's experience of the park.