It’s strange to remember an event that is so clearly going to be in history books—if it isn’t already. Everybody who lives even a short while sees history at some remove, but it’s sometimes hard to tell what will be remembered and what mostly forgotten. With 9/11, it was clear from the get-go. Much like this year’s COVID pandemic, it formed a clear threshold beyond which many things would never be the same.
The Looming Tower doesn’t spend much time detasiling the attack itself. The planning occurs intermittently over the last quarter of the book, while the event itself is over in ten pages. Instead, Wright’s book chronicles the events and figures that culminated in atrocity. Obviously this includes Bin Laden, whose life features in much of the book’s second half. But there are also figures that I hadn’t heard of before. People like Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic scholar whose uncompromising take on Islam provided rationale for the jihads to come, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian radical bent on overthrowing Mubarek’s secular regime and installing a caliphate. Zawahiri provides an interesting counterpoint to bin Laden, as his intial position of dominance shrinks while bin Laden’s rises, until he is forced to fold his organization into al Qaeda.
American figures also get billing, thoug hthe book is lopsided towards the Islamists. Most notably, it follows John O’Neil, a senior FBI agent who doggedly pursued al Qaeda when it was an obscure fledgling organization in the Arab world and no one outside of that sphere knew about it or cared. O’Neil is an interesting figure, brilliant but flawed, and his final days form a sad counterpoint that would have seemed unbelievable in a novel, but somehow actually happened.
The book is well written, with sleek, unadormed prose and a journalistic eye for detail.