The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
What a story it is. And what a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. The Looming Tower is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve, and carried along by villains and heroes that only a crime novelist could dream up. It’s an education, too—though you’d never know it—a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today..
...a book filled with dazzling insight, pitch-perfect anecdotes, and compelling context. Simply put, this is the most thorough and accessible account of the people, politics, and roiling theology behind Islamic terrorism. It should be required reading for every American; yes, it is that good.
One of the darker choruses of this excellent work of journalism is the success that three of those allied governments, the Saudi Arabian, Pakistani and Egyptian, have had in diverting the fundamentalist warriors away from their original prime target – them – and towards the West.
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.
Wright is a New Yorker journalist who knows how to take care of his prose and construct a seductive narrative. His book is a skilful reconstruction of the lives of the main characters involved in what is now an old story.
Wright deftly evokes the jihadist milieu, but he is on less solid ground later in the book when he attempts to recast his narrative into a sort of police procedural: a race against time by the forces of good—embodied by John O'Neill, the mercurial head of the FBI's New York counterterrorism office—to thwart the evil machinations that culminated in the 9/11 attacks.
At times, Wright seems to go too far, seeing bin Laden and his associates as representing the entire jihadist movement, and he has little to say about political divisions among Islamists as well as about the different goals of such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But he has given a finely judged account of both collaboration among terrorists and rivalry between the CIA and the FBI.
[Wright] has written what must be considered a definitive work on the antecedents to 9/11.
[Wright] brings exhaustive research and delightful prose to one of the best books yet on the history of terrorism.