mondojohnson

The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker, is a remarkable piece of writing and reporting. Its brilliance is all the more sparkling due to the five-year anniversary of September 11, which has produced a surfeit of banal reflections and poor documentaries.

The book moves inexorably from the intellectual foundations of “jihadism”, as expressed by martyred Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb in the 1940′s, to the present-day al-Qaeda. Along the way we learn the biography and motivations of Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, and how various accidents of history moved them toward their deadly collaboration. In this it reads like a novel: we almost sympathize with the men on their descent into villainy.

The stylish writing is backed up by incredibly thorough and penetrating reportage — Woodwardesque, I’d say (which is being too generous to Woodward, I think).