Steve Coll’s last book, Ghost Wars, was possibly—ok, probably—the best foreign policy tract of the decade. Ghost Wars won the 2005 Pulitzer. Coll’s name grew in font size on the cover of his new book, The Bin Ladens. NYT.com gave the book’s review a front page feature yesterday, where Michiko Kakutani said:
Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics. It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”
Tonight at 7:30 Coll reads at Barnes & Noble 1972 Broadway at 66th St, Upper West Side, Manhattan (Free)
TAGS: BOOKS, free, Las Vegas, Manhattan, Osama bin Laden, political, Review, Travel, war
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