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The Family That Spawned 9/11

The NY Times has an interesting article on a new book on the Bin Laden family - at least one of whom, Osama, is said to have been behind 9/11.

"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.

“The Bin Ladens” uses the prism of one family to examine the mind-boggling, culture-rocking effects that sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia, while shedding new light on the “troubled, compulsive, greed-inflected, secret-burdened” relationship that developed between that desert nation and the United States, and the conflicts many Saudis felt, pulled between the traditional pieties of their ancestors and the glittering temptations of the West.

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.”

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