Wright seems to have found his calling: a perceptive and intense page- turner, this selection and Peter Bergen's The Osama bin Laden I Know (2. The tragic centerpiece of the book, familiar to New Yorker readers, is Wright's sensitive portrayal of John O'Neill, the deeply flawed working- class FBI gumshoe from New Jersey who may have been the only American to fully understand the al- Qaeda threat before 9/1. The events are familiar: this account begins with theorist Sayid Qutb, covers the trajectories of bin Laden and Ayman al- Zawahiri, and culminates with Mohammed Atta and the collapsing Trade Center.īut Wright's interview-fueled, character- driven approach captures both the complexity of individual actors-Qutb's alienation, for example, and bin Laden's struggle for legitimacy-as well as the fluid internal dynamics of the often covert terrorist organization. The product of his efforts is more deeply researched and engagingly narrated than nearly all of the looming stack of books on Osama bin Laden and his cohorts published in the past five years. This is an important, gripping and profoundly disheartening book. Wright shows that 9/1.Īs a fugitive, bin Ladin's days as a terror mastermind may be past, but his success has spawned swarms of imitators. Wright's step- by- step description of these attacks reveals that planning terror is a sloppy business, leaving a trail of clues that, in the case of 9/1. Less wealthy than believed, bin Laden's talents lay in organization and PR, Wright asserts. Osama bin Laden, pursued a different agenda, blaming America for Islam's problems. Many helped Afghanistan resist the Russian invasion of 1.Īl- Qaeda, formed in Afghanistan in 1. II, Islamic militants failed to establish theocracies in any Arab country. He begins with the observation that, despite an impressive record of terror and assassination, post–WWar. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/1. Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower is a masterful account of the events that culminated in al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is a historical look at the way in which Al-Qaeda came into being, the background for various terrorist attacks and. Tahar Rahim has been tapped as one of the two leads in Hulu’s high-profile The Looming Tower, a straight-to-series drama based on Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize.

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