The looming tower : Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11
A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11. Lawrence Wright conducted on five years of research and hundreds of interviews to tell the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI's counterterrorism chief, John O'Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal. As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the crosscurrents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden ... the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organization capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole ... O'Neill's heroic efforts to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers ... Prince Turki's transformation from bin Laden's ally to his enemy ... and the failures of the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Here is Sayyid Qutb, founder of the modern Islamist movement, lonely and despairing as he meets Western culture up close in 1940s America; the privileged childhoods of bin Laden and Zawahiri; family life in the al-Qaeda compounds of Sudan and Afghanistan; O'Neill's high-wire act in balancing his all-consuming career with his equally entangling personal life-he was living with three women, each of them unaware of the others' existence-and the nitty-gritty of turf battles among U.S. intelligence agencies
True crime literature
469 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm.
9780375414862, 9781400030842, 037541486X, 1400030846
64592193
The martyr
The sporting club
The founder
Change
The miracles
The base
Return of the hero
Paradise
The Silicon Valley
Paradise lost
The prince of darkness
The boy spies
Hijira
Going operational
Bread and water
"Now it begins"
The new millennium
Boom
The big wedding
Revelations