Annie's review of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
This book written by Lawrence Wright, a journalist for the New Yorker, tries to explain how and why 9/11 happened. It starts with a short biography of one of the fathers of Islamic fundamentalism, Sayyid Qutb, and then moves on to biographic chapters on Ahmed Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, the powers behind al-Qaeda. From there, the book covers al-Qaeda and its associated groups from the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s until September 11, 2001. Wright also spends some time discussing the people in the White House, CIA, and FBI responsible for counterterrorism in that time period and the silent war they waged on al-Qaeda and, apparently, each other. The book is lucid and easy to read, although sometimes it's hard to keep track of the names of all the compatriots of bin Laden and Zawahiri.
I'm glad I read this book. It's exhaustively researched, at least as much as an American could research this topic. I learned a lot about modern Egyptian political history, al-Qa...more
I'm glad I read this book. It's exhaustively researched, at least as much as an American could research this topic. I learned a lot about modern Egyptian political history, al-Qa...more
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