The Looming Tower (edit title)

Timothy Gray approved 72% of Pequeño saltamontes’s request to combine 11 books, including The Looming Tower, Wednesday, November 25 2009. (show what wasn’t approved) (hide what wasn’t approved)

Pequeño saltamontes submitted a request to combine 11 books, including The Looming Tower, Wednesday, November 25 2009.

Timothy Gray approved something witty’s request to change the title of The Looming Tower Saturday, October 31 2009.

Timothy Gray edited the awards of The Looming Tower Monday, October 12 2009.

• Added an award: Pulitzer Prize
• Added category of an award: Pulitzer Prize General Nonfiction
• Added year of an award: Pulitzer Prize 2007

something witty changed the title of The Looming Tower Saturday, October 3 2009.

Shelfari edited the description of The Looming Tower Saturday, August 1 2009.

• A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright’s remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States. The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling 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 . . . the failures of the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. The Looming Tower broadens and deepens our knowledge of these signal events by taking us behind the scenes. 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. Brilliantly conceived and written, The Looming Tower draws all elements of the story into a galvanizing narrative that adds immeasurably to our understanding of how we arrived at September 11, 2001. The richness of its new information, and the depth of its perceptions, can help us deal more wisely and effectively with the continuing terrorist threat.

Shelfari edited the contributors of The Looming Tower Wednesday, July 22 2009.

• Added a contributor: Lawrence Wright: (Primary Author)