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.

"Almost five years ago, 19 terrorists hijacked four airplanes and changed the course of history. Any doubt that the threat to commercial aviation had receded was shattered just weeks ago when an alleged plot to blow up 10 planes over the Atlantic reminded us how vulnerable we still are to such massive attacks. Just as we underestimated al-Qaeda then, we risk repeating the same mistake now. Al-Qaeda..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) today is frequently described as if it is in retreat: a broken and beaten organization, incapable of mounting further attacks on its own, that has devolved operational authority either to its various affiliates and associates or to organically produced, homegrown terrorist entities. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, al-Qaeda is on the march. It has regrouped and reorganized from the setbacks meted out by the United States, its allies and partners shortly after 9/11 — above all, the loss of al-Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan — and is marshaling its forces to continue the war that Osama bin Laden declared against America 10 years ago with his then mostly ignored fatwa.

In this respect, al-Qaeda is functioning exactly as its founders envisioned it: as both an inspiration and an organization, simultaneously summoning a broad universe of like-minded extremists to violence while still providing guidance and assistance for more spectacular types of terrorist operations. On the one hand, it remains true to its name: the Arabic word for a 'base of operation' or 'foundation,' from which a worldwide Islamist revolution can be waged by inspiring radicalized Muslims to join the movement's holy fight. On the other, al-Qaeda continues to exercise its core operational and command-and-control capabilities: directing and implementing terrorist attacks, including perhaps the thwarted airline bombings, the 7/7 suicide bombings that occurred in London last July and the foiled 2004 plot to stage simultaneous suicide attacks on economic targets in lower Manhattan, Newark, New Jersey and Washington, D.C.

To comprehend al-Qaeda's extraordinary resiliency and stubborn capacity for renewal and regeneration, one has to understand its early history and especially the powerful personalities of the two men responsible for its emergence and evolution: bin Laden and his deputy cum mentor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Although there have been many biographies of bin Laden — two of the best of them written by Peter L. Bergen and Michael Scheuer — surprisingly little attention has been devoted to Zawahiri, an Egyptian jihadist. Lawrence Wright, a staff writer for the New Yorker who wrote a memorable profile of Zawahiri four years ago, magisterially redresses this imbalance in 'The Looming Tower.'

Wright tells the compelling story here of a symbiotic relationship between bin Laden and Zawahiri: Their respective strengths complemented each other and created a sum far greater than its parts. The two men's shared strategic vision of a global jihad transformed al-Qaeda into an organization that can punch far above its weight.

Wright deftly evokes the jihadist milieu, but he is on less solid ground later in the book when he attempts to recast his narrative into a sort of police procedural: a race against time by the forces of good — embodied by John O'Neill, the mercurial head of the FBI's New York counterterrorism office — to thwart the evil machinations that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. By all accounts, O'Neill was a larger-than-life figure: a Damon Runyon-esque type who J. Edgar Hoover reportedly complained dressed more like a mobster than a G-man. In an especially cruel twist of fate, O'Neill was among the victims murdered on 9/11, having only recently left the FBI for a high-profile private security job at a company located in the twin towers. But captivating as O'Neill's story is, it comes across as a somewhat distracting addendum to what at heart is a rich, finely detailed account of how bin Laden and Zawahiri, two men of vastly different backgrounds and temperaments, together launched an epic struggle more than a decade ago that continues to dominate international politics today.

Another problem is Wright's inclination to view through the prism of O'Neill's beloved FBI America's inchoate, uncoordinated and ultimately failed efforts to blunt the spectacular al-Qaeda attack that U.S. counterterrorism officials feared during the tense months before 9/11. Wright may not have had the same access to intelligence officers that he enjoyed with O'Neill's former colleagues in the FBI. This would explain the short shrift he gives to the similarly tireless and prescient efforts of the CIA's bin Laden unit and especially to its own, equally mercurial chief, Michael Scheuer.

The awful day that concludes 'The Looming Tower' is the starting point for Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton's 'Without Precedent.' The shock of 9/11 led an initially hesitant Congress and a reluctant Bush administration to appoint an independent commission with a mandate, as the co-authors put it, 'to understand an event that was unprecedented in the destruction it had wrought on the American homeland, and appalling even within the catalogue of human brutality.' Few persons in America today are as respected and admired as the commission's co-chairs: Kean, a Republican former governor of New Jersey, and Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who served more than 30 years in Congress. Although their deep, abiding sense of service and unassailable rectitude obviously would have precluded them from writing a thoroughly unexpurgated inside account, their reluctance to 'dish out the dirt' doesn't mean that they pull their punches.

While readers may be disappointed to learn no more than has previously been reported of the 10 commissioners' historic April 29, 2004, meeting with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the authors are nonetheless unsparing in their descriptions of key administration figures who either testified before them (National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice), attempted to frustrate their investigation (Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales) or willfully provided 'inaccurate — if not untruthful' testimony (Administrator Jane Garvey of the Federal Aviation Administration and Maj. Gen. Craig R. McKinley, commander of NORAD). Disappointingly, though, the reasoning behind many of the Commission's more controversial conclusions and recommendations — including the decision to try to reform the sclerotic FBI rather than endorse the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency along the lines of Britain's MI5 — is not fully explained; at the same time, the commission's litany of frustrations with the White House, the Republican-led Congress and various federal agencies such as the FAA or military commands such as NORAD is candidly described and bluntly detailed.

The 9/11 Commission and its work are, of course, already well-known because of the open, public hearings; the exhaustively reported disputes over access to top-secret documents, senior officials and other sources essential to its investigation; and its brilliantly written, meticulously researched, best-selling final report. Yet Kean and Hamilton write so well and so fluidly — and with such evident brio and straightforwardness — that the reader cannot help but be transfixed. Despite its familiarity, their story still comes across as fresh and as gripping as when it was the stuff of daily headline news reports and galvanizing hearing-room drama. We are reminded, for example, how a tip from the CIA pointed the commission to Jose Melendez-Perez. In some of the most riveting testimony the panel heard, Melendez-Perez, an immigration inspector at Orlando International Airport, recounted how he had stopped the likely 20th hijacker, a Saudi national named Mohamed al-Qahtani, from entering the country a month before the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, the commission's staff concluded that while Melendez-Perez was interviewing Qahtani on Aug. 4, 2001, the attack's ringleader, Mohamed Atta, was outside waiting for him. 'If everyone up and down the chain had been as professional as you,' one commissioner, former Navy secretary John F. Lehman, told Melendez-Perez at the hearing, 'the attacks would not have happened.'

'Without Precedent' also reminds us why the 9/11 Commission set the gold standard for both transparency and impact: It overcame formidable odds and at times tremendous (though now mostly forgotten) invective and opprobrium from congressional leaders, media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and the New York Post's front page, New York City officials, members of less-prominent past national commissions on terrorism and even some of the same 9/11 family members who had lobbied so hard for the commission's creation in the first place. In this respect, Kean and Hamilton have written an essential guide for others who may someday find themselves appointed to serve on blue-ribbon panels and high-profile commissions.

Each book is a welcome and important addition to the growing literature on 9/11: 'The Looming Tower' by providing a seminal account of the two central figures in al-Qaeda and of the heady ideological currents and explosive dynamics that drove the 9/11 plot forward, and 'Without Precedent' for reminding us of the failures that led to that tragic day, the herculean effort devoted to explaining why and how it happened, and how far we still have to go to prevent its recurrence.

Bruce Hoffman is a professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center in West Point, N.Y. He is the author of 'Inside Terrorism.'" Reviewed by Bruce Hoffman, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Wright (a staff writer for The New Yorker) combines a journalistic history of the origins and evolutions of Al Qaeda with the story of American intelligence and military responses to the threat posed by the organization. His account begins with experiences of the organization's ideological father, Sayyid Qutb, in the United States in the 1950s, and then traces Qutb's involvement in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and how it eventually led to the founding by Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al Qaeda. His treatment of these figures, and of the CIA and other officials tracking their movements, discusses their ideological, organizational, and political evolution, but also places a greater emphasis on personal and family relationships than might be commonly expected in such a narrative. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

"A towering achievement. One of the best and more important books of recent years. Lawrence Wright has dug deep into and written well a story every American should know. A masterful combination of reporting and writing." Dan Rather

"Lawrence Wright provides a graceful and remarkably intimate set of portraits of the people who brought us 9/11. It is a tale of extravagant zealotry and incessant bumbling that would be merely absurd if the consequences were not so grisly." Gary Sick

"Lawrence Wright's integrity and diligence as a reporter shine through every page of this riveting narrative." Robert A. Caro

"What a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book....The portrait of John O'Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone." Dexter Filkins, The New York Times Book Review

"At once wrenchingly intimate and boldly sweeping in its historical perspective... a narrative history that possesses all the immediacy and emotional power of a novel." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Mr. Wright provides a cohesive narrative tying together what previously seemed to be loose ends. But he is wise enough to know that although he presents a version of horrifying truth, the full truth might be more horrifying still." Dallas Morning News

Lawrence Wright graduated from Tulane University and spent two years teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law. The author of five works of nonfiction — City Children, Country Summer; In the New World; Saints and Sinners; Remembering Satan; and Twins — he has also written a novel, God's Favorite, and was cowriter of the movie The Siege. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.