The Looming Tower:Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright
"I chose to read The Looming Tower in large part because it was nominated and actually won the Pulitzer Prize, and I try and follow the nonfiction Pulitzer Prizes. I've found they tend to be very enjoyable. I also read it because of just before, I had read 102 minutes, which was the story of the people inside the towers; and so I thought I should understand the background to how the towers were attacked.
The book is really a historical survey of in large part Al-Qaeda, how Al-Qaeda came to be, and it begins much earlier on actually in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and people that had issues with the way those governments would run and the beginning of sort of a real fundamentalist form of Islam.
I think my primary reaction was really very educational. I mean it wasn't visceral in the sense that it was these people or this craziness, this fundamentalism. It really ended up being more of an understanding - I mean not that it's somehow right that there was a logic behind it and that there were circumstances that led up to people choosing to make these decisions.
I think the book was lacking a real discussion after 9/11 about what else is happening as a function of this same sort of fascism, this sort of fundamentalist form of Islam; and that was sort of hard. Because it really ends at 9/11 and has maybe a chapter epilogue, and I think you lose out on a lot of the knowledge that you had at the very outset about how this was forming and what this means. It sort of lacked a path to discussing it in the future.
I think anyone that really wants a nuanced understanding of how 9/11 came about from the not American side would really benefit from reading the book. I think it's important to not just see how the United States was attacked but to understand why it might have been seen as a target and why that was a viable target. I would give The Looming Tower five out of five stars."
RSS feed 
