The Looming Tower
by Lawrence Wright
Summary
Lawrence Wright builds The Looming Tower around the people whose choices led to September 11 rather than around the attack itself, which the book barely narrates. He starts decades earlier with Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian scholar whose stay in the United States in the late 1940s hardened him into the Islamist ideologue whose writing would shape a generation of militants, and follows Ayman al-Zawahiri from Egyptian prison cells into a partnership with a wealthy young Saudi, Osama bin Laden, that eventually merges their two organizations into al-Qaeda. Wright treats bin Laden's own life in full, his Saudi childhood, his years fighting in Afghanistan, his exile in Sudan and his return to Taliban controlled Afghanistan, without losing sight of the smaller men and decisions around him that made his rise possible.
On the American side, Wright follows John O'Neill, the FBI's chief bin Laden hunter, whose warnings about al-Qaeda's ambitions repeatedly ran up against turf battles with the CIA and a government reluctant to treat terrorism as the priority he insisted it was. Richard Clarke at the National Security Council and Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA's dedicated bin Laden unit, appear as figures fighting the same losing battle from different directions. Wright narrates the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole as the clearest warnings the system failed to act on.
The book's cruelest detail arrives almost as an aside: O'Neill retired from the FBI in August 2001 to take a job running security at the World Trade Center, where he died on September 11. Wright writes in clear, reported prose organized more like a spy novel than an academic history, and the book suits a reader who wants the human decisions and rivalries behind a catastrophe usually described only in terms of policy failure.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Lawrence Wright the 2007 Prize for General Nonfiction for The Looming Tower, published in 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf. It was a finalist for the National Book Award the same year and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for 2006 and, in 2007, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Lionel Gelber Prize. The finalists for the Pulitzer that year were Pete Earley's Crazy, about the mental health system, and Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco, about the Iraq War.
Hulu adapted the book into a ten episode miniseries that premiered in February 2018, with Jeff Daniels playing O'Neill, Alec Baldwin playing CIA director George Tenet and Tahar Rahim playing FBI agent Ali Soufan. The book was named to the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the twenty first century and remains a standard account of al-Qaeda's origins, and Wright has continued reporting on the region since, though The Looming Tower is still the work most closely tied to his name.