The Bricklayer's Sons: The Family That Spawned 9/11

[babylonsister]

The Bricklayer's Sons: The Family That Spawned 9/11
By Michiko Kakutani
The New York Times

Tuesday 01 April 2008


The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century. By Steve Coll. Illustrated. 671 pages. The Penguin Press. $35.

Steve Coll's riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden's extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics.

"The Bin Ladens" uses the prism of one family to examine the mind-boggling, culture-rocking effects that sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia, while shedding new light on the "troubled, compulsive, greed-inflected, secret-burdened" relationship that developed between that desert nation and the United States, and the conflicts many Saudis felt, pulled between the traditional pieties of their ancestors and the glittering temptations of the West.

It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll's Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001."

That earlier work focused on the rise of Islamic extremism during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s in Afghanistan, where Mr. bin Laden first emerged as a leader, while this volume looks at the familial, cultural and political forces that shaped him as he came of age in Saudi Arabia.

Parts of Mr. Coll's narrative are heavily indebted to other reporters' pioneering work on this subject - most notably, Peter Bergen's two books on Mr. bin Laden, and "The Looming Tower," Lawrence Wright's searing book about Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11. But by focusing on Mr. bin Laden's conflicted relationship with his family and that family's complicated relationship with the West, Mr. Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker who also worked for many years at The Washington Post, has added fascinating new details to our understanding of how Mr. bin Laden evolved from a loyal family adjutant into an angry black sheep, intent on lashing out at the very people - the Saudi royal family and the United States of America - that his father and brothers had cultivated in their business dealings for years.

Just as recent books like Jacob Weisberg's "Bush Tragedy" have underscored the role Oedipal rivalries may have played in George W. Bush's presidency and his decision to go to war against Iraq, so this volume underscores the role that Freudian family dynamics may have played in Mr. bin Laden's radicalization and his declaration of war against America.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040208I.shtml

[EstimatedProphet]

1. And Here I thought from the title it would be about the Bushes!

[Sean Stuart]

2. I've read Ghost Wars. Fantastic. Steve Coll is great and thorough writer