The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, August 2006.
Book information: publisher, Google Book Search, Amazon.com.
Links:
- LawrenceWright.com.
- Lawrence Wright, Wikipedia.
- Lawrence Wright at The New Yorker.
- Conversations with History: Lawrence Wright, 13 November 2006.
"Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."
Harry Kreisler, Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley.
link to video - Wright wrote the screenplay for the film The Seige (1998) (IMDb link).
- Steve Coll & Lawrence Wright, The Book Club: New books dissected over e-mail, Slate.com, August 2006.
This book views the rise of political and militant Islamists throught the biographies of a few individuals, focusing mainly on Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egypt and Osama bin Laden of Saudi Arabia. Wright's well written narrative shows these individuals' emergence in their local economic and political contexts, which allows for some exposition on the various local and international strains of Islamist thought (for example: Sayyid Qutb; the Muslim Brotherhood; the Saudi state-sponsored Wahhab sect). The American response is viewed through the career of John P. O'Neill. This personal view of events has its strengths (Wright shows how individuals' political grievances emerge and morph into participation in violent movements); but Wright's book leaves out significant parts of the story (which no one book could cover). There is no mention of U.S. foreign policy towards the Arab world since 1945; no mention of the role of Israel; very indirect mention of the geopolitics of petroleum; no large scale sociological or historical surveys of the various nations; little discussion of the policies and actions of the secret/security/intelligence services of the various nations. That last topic may be well covered by Steve Coll's book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004). A list of essential books should also include the recent books by Ahmed Rashid: Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia (2000); Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (2002); Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (2008).