The Looming Tower

Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307266087
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A “heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11” (The New York Times Book Review), this definitive history explains in gripping detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. In gripping narrative that spans five decades, Lawrence Wright re-creates firsthand the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of the most successful terrorist group in history. He follows FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill as he uncovers the emerging danger from al-Qaeda in the 1990s and struggles to track this new threat. Packed with new information and a deep historical perspective, The Looming Tower is a sweeping, unprecedented history of the long road to September 11.

The Looming Tower

Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141980850
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 576

Book Description
THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING BESTSELLER, NOW A MAJOR NEW TV SERIES This is the definitive account of the run-up to 9/11: from the man who lit the spark of radical Islam in 1948, to those who built up a terror network, and to the FBI agent whose warnings of 'something big' coming were ignored until the Twin Towers fell. 'The Looming Tower is a thriller. And it's a tragedy, too' The New York Times 'The most detailed (and thrilling) account we have of the events that led to the destruction of the Twin Towers' Observer, Books of the Year 'Possibly the best book yet written on the rise of al-Qaeda ... beautifully written and wonderfully compelling' William Dalrymple 'We meet some formidable schemers and killers ... fabulists crazed with blood and death' Martin Amis

Going Clear

Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385350279
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower comes “an utterly necessary story” (The Wall Street Journal) that pulls back the curtain on the church of Scientology: one of the most secretive organizations at work today. • The Basis for the HBO Documentary. Scientology presents itself as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment, but its practices have long been shrouded in mystery. Now Lawrence Wright—armed with his investigative talents, years of archival research, and more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—uncovers the inner workings of the church. We meet founder L. Ron Hubbard, the highly imaginative but mentally troubled science-fiction writer, and his tough, driven successor, David Miscavige. We go inside their specialized cosmology and language. We learn about the church’s legal attacks on the IRS, its vindictive treatment of critics, and its phenomenal wealth. We see the church court celebrities such as Tom Cruise while consigning its clergy to hard labor under billion-year contracts. Through it all, Wright asks what fundamentally comprises a religion, and if Scientology in fact merits this Constitutionally-protected label.

God Save Texas

Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525520112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.

Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State

Author: Ali Soufan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039324203X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Book Description
"Anyone who wants to understand the world we live in now should read this book." —Lawrence Wright To eliminate the scourge of terrorism, we must first know who the enemy actually is, and what his motivations are. In Anatomy of Terror, former FBI special agent and New York Times best-selling author Ali Soufan dissects Osama bin Laden’s brand of jihadi terrorism and its major offshoots, revealing how these organizations were formed, how they operate, their strengths, and—crucially—their weaknesses. This riveting account examines the new Islamic radicalism through the stories of its flag-bearers, including a U.S. Air Force colonel who once served Saddam Hussein, a provincial bookworm who declared himself caliph of all Muslims, and bin Laden’s own beloved son Hamza, a prime candidate to lead the organization his late father founded. Anatomy of Terror lays bare the psychology and inner workings of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their spawn, and shows how the spread of terror can be stopped. Winner of the Airey Neave Memorial Book Prize

The Terror Years

Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385352077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
With the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. Here, in ten powerful pieces first published in The New Yorker, he recalls the path that terror in the Middle East has taken, from the rise of al-Qaeda in the 1990s to the recent beheadings of reporters and aid workers by ISIS. The Terror Years draws on several articles he wrote while researching The Looming Tower, as well as many that he’s written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread. They include a portrait of the “man behind bin Laden,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the tumultuous Egypt he helped spawn; an indelible impression of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom of silence under the control of the religious police; the Syrian film industry, at the time compliant at the edges but already exuding a feeling of the barely masked fury that erupted into civil war; the 2006–11 Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, a study in the disparate value of human lives. Other chapters examine al-Qaeda as it forms a master plan for its future, experiences a rebellion from within the organization, and spins off a growing web of worldwide terror. The American response is covered in profiles of two FBI agents and the head of the intelligence community. The book ends with a devastating piece about the capture and slaying by ISIS of four American journalists and aid workers, and our government’s failed response. On the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, The Terror Years is at once a unifying recollection of the roots of contemporary Middle Eastern terrorism, a study of how it has grown and metastasized, and, in the scary and moving epilogue, a cautionary tale of where terrorism might take us yet.

The End of October

Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593081145
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—a riveting thriller and “all-too-convincing chronicle of science, espionage, action and speculation” (The Wall Street Journal). At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will have staggering repercussions. Halfway across the globe, the deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security scrambles to mount a response to the rapidly spreading pandemic leapfrogging around the world, which she believes may be the result of an act of biowarfare. And a rogue experimenter in man-made diseases is preparing his own terrifying solution. As already-fraying global relations begin to snap, the virus slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions and decimating the population. With his own wife and children facing diminishing odds of survival, Henry travels from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia to his home base at the CDC in Atlanta, searching for a cure and for the origins of this seemingly unknowable disease. The End of October is a one-of-a-kind thriller steeped in real-life political and scientific implications, filled with the insight that has been the hallmark of Wright’s acclaimed nonfiction and the full-tilt narrative suspense that only the best fiction can offer.

The Plague Year

Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593320735
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.

The Man Who Warned America

Author: Murray Weiss
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006050823X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
The first comprehensive inside look at the investigation into Al Qaeda, and at John O፥ill, the FBI counter–terrorism agent who warned that an attack like September 11 was imminent. For many people, September 11 was the day ೨e unimaginableߨappened. But one FBI agent, John O፥ill, had repeatedly warned the US Government that such an attack was possible. Ironically, O፥ill lost his own life on September 11, just days after beginning a new job as head of security for the World Trade Center. As one of the FBI's foremost counter–terrorism experts, John O፥ill played a leading role in almost every major investigation of terrorism against Americans in the past decade. O፥ill was a dashing, larger–than–life character who irritated many members of US and foreign governments with his aggressive, hands–on tactics and his insistent, repeated warnings about the possibility of an attack on US soil. Disillusioned by his experiences with the FBI, O፥ill left governmental service to assume the position of chief of security for the Twin Towers in August 2001. Full of twists and turns, John O፥ill's tragic story reveals how one man's unheeded warnings came back to haunt the country he worked so hard to defend.

The Black Banners

Author: Ali H. Soufan
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780241956168
Category : Torture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A book that will change the way we think about al-Qaeda, intelligence, and the events that forever changed America.