David'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
The author spent five years interviewing people throughout the Middle East and United States, examining the events leading up to September 11th, 2001, and portions of this book have appeared in The New Yorker over the past couple of years. The overall book is a rare combination of gripping story-telling and thoughtful perspective.
Where the book really shines is the personal, political and religious insight that it gives into motivations of the terrorists, as well as the American bureaucracy and intelligence agencies that failed to stop them. It describes the experience of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of the Muslim Brotherhood, and how his experience in 1940's America left him radicalized; the privileged upbringings of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, and their subsequent radicalization in the Soviet-Afghan and Egyptian prisons, respectively. Many of the eventual hijackers and terrorists are described in rich stories from their families and acquaintances, to d...more
Where the book really shines is the personal, political and religious insight that it gives into motivations of the terrorists, as well as the American bureaucracy and intelligence agencies that failed to stop them. It describes the experience of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of the Muslim Brotherhood, and how his experience in 1940's America left him radicalized; the privileged upbringings of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, and their subsequent radicalization in the Soviet-Afghan and Egyptian prisons, respectively. Many of the eventual hijackers and terrorists are described in rich stories from their families and acquaintances, to d...more
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