New Book: The Looming Tower
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
Listening to NPR last week I heard the author of this book speak about the Middle East. He struck me as quite intelligent and made several good points, though the details of the entire thing have slipped my mind. All I had was the author’s name that I managed to speak into my cellphone’s voice recorder as I drove to work. Luckily, that was enough to track the book down during a trip to Barnes and Noble.
The book is an account of the Islamist movement that lead up to groups like al-Qaeda and the response of U.S. and international intelligence to the growing movement.
I have made it a goal of mine to try and read more books about history, politics and current events. Of late, the little reading I do is usually non-fiction anyway, and up until relatively recently was largely of news (the rest being for one hobby or another). Well, slowly but surely I am getting fed up with news sources for being too repetative, too brief and only making the most glaring connections between world events - in effect rendering the news as a source of despair not of understanding. So, my hope is that something more substantial, namely books, will shed a little light on world events and what they might mean comprehensively and long term - not things any politician or the media ever wastes much breath to touch on.
When I get this read, I’ll at least post some thoughts on it and decide whether I think it clues us common folk into what is going on in the world, as I hope it will.
Tags: books, foreign affairs