The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11(海市蜃楼)

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 cross- currents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . . . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organiza-tion 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 despair-ing as he meets Western culture up close in 1940s America; the privileged childhoods of bin Laden and Zawahiri; family life in the al-Qaeda com-pounds 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 bat-tles among U.S. intelligence agencies.

作者简介：
LAWRENCE WRIGHT graduated from Tulane Uni-versity 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.

Map
Prologue
1 The Martyr
2 The Sporting Club
3 The Founder
4 Change
5 The Miracles
6 The Base
7 Return of the Hero
8 Paradise
9 The Silicon Valley
10 Paradise Lost
11 The Prince of Darkness
12 The Boy Spies
13 Hijira
14 Going Operational
15 Bread and Water
16 "Now It Begins"
17 The New Millennium
18 Boom
19 The Big Wedding
20 Revelations
Principal Characters
Notes
Bibliography
Author Interviews
Acknowledgments and Notes on Sources
Index