Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the
national bestseller Ghost Wars, Steve Coll presents
the story of the Bin Laden family’s rise to power and
privilege, revealing new information to show how American
influences changed the family and how one member’s rebellion
changed America
The Bin Ladens rose from poverty
to privilege; they loyally served the Saudi royal family for
generations—and then one of their number changed history on
September 11, 2001. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Steve
Coll tells the epic story of the rise of the Bin Laden
family and of the wildly diverse lifestyles of the
generation to which Osama bin Laden belongs, and against
whom he rebelled. Starting with the family’s escape from
famine at the beginning of the twentieth century through its
jet-set era in America after the 1970s oil boom, and finally
to the family’s attempts to recover from September 11,
The Bin Ladens unearths extensive new material about
the family and its relationship with the United States, and
provides a richly revealing and emblematic narrative of our
globally interconnected times.
To a much greater
extent than has been previously understood, the Bin Laden
family owned an impressive share of the America upon which
Osama ultimately declared war—shopping centers, apartment
complexes, luxury estates, privatized prisons in
Massachusetts, corporate stocks, an airport, and much more.
They financed Hollywood movies and negotiated over real
estate with Donald Trump. They came to regard George H. W.
Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Prince Charles as friends of their
family. And yet, as was true of the larger relationship
between the Saudi and American governments, when tested by
Osama’s violence, the family’s involvement in the United
States proved to be narrow and brittle.
Among the
many memorable figures that cross these pages is Osama’s
older brother, Salem—a free-living, chainsmoking,
guitar-strumming pilot, adventurer, and businessman who
cavorted across America and Europe and once proposed
marriage to four American and European girlfriends
simultaneously, attempting to win a bet with the king of
Saudi Arabia. Osama and Salem’s father, Mohamed bin Laden,
is another force in the narrative—an illiterate bricklayer
who created the family fortune through perspicacity and wit,
until his sudden death in an airplane crash in 1967, an
accident caused by an error by his American pilot.
At the story’s heart lies an immigrant family’s attempt to
adapt simultaneously to Saudi Arabia’s puritanism and
America’s myriad temptations. The family generation to which
Osama belonged—twenty-five brothers and twenty-nine
sisters—had to cope with intense change. Most of them were
born into a poor society where religion dominated public
life. Yet by the time they became young adults, these Bin
Ladens found themselves bombarded by Western-influenced
ideas about individual choice, by gleaming new shopping
malls and international fashion brands, by Hollywood movies
and changing sexual mores—a dizzying world that was theirs
for the taking, because they each received annual dividends
that started in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. How
they navigated these demands is an authentic, humanizing
story of Saudi Arabia, America, and the sources of
attraction and repulsion still present in the countries’
awkward embrace.
The correct reveiw isn't attached to the title. If you want to see a review, you can find a Washington Post reveiew on Amazon.com (Ruth Hemingosn 2:27pm April 7, 2008)
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