New York : Vintage Books, 2007.
540 p. : ill., maps ; 21 cm.
I've read a lot about the Middle East, and about 9/11, but The Looming Tower is one of the best books to pull all the narrative threads together into an informative, compelling and stunning read.
There were several things I learned that surprised me. I didn't realize how central the Egyptian fundamentalist-jihad movement was to al-Qaeda. I had no idea that Bin Laden's time in Sudan was marked by his arriving a multimillionaire and leaving virtually broke. I didn't know that when he left Sudan for Afghanistan, he had no idea who the Taliban were and they were cautious about him, too. Probably the most painful revelations of the book are the several times that the CIA refused to share information with the FBI which almost surely would have lead to the uncovering and thwarting of the 9/11 plot. There is more to discover in Wright's definitive history.
I would definitely recommend this book to a student with a keen interest in the background of 9/11 or to a student working on a research project about 9/11. It is a fine book, one which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment