where can I download The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright without signing online read shop phone

Book description

Book description
Lawrence Wright is one of those guys who could easily put novelists out of business, and this book made me question why I read fiction at all. The locations, characters, and events in The Looming Tower are so much more fascinating than anything an author could invent, and the fact that theyre real makes them seem important in a way fiction almost never does. I loved this book, and my picayune quibbles -- a few recurring awkward sentence constructions, inexplicably referring to domestic terrorists who bomb clinics and murder doctors as protesters -- just need to be dispatched with here so people know I actually read this book, and am not just brainlessly screaming about how good it is because someones slipped me a Samsonite suitcase stuffed with cash.I never wouldve read this, actually, if it hadnt been assigned for school, because I purposely avoid everything written about the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01. Having to read this book was good because it made me think a lot more about why I do that, plus most of it wasnt really about 9/11, but about the development during the last century of Islamist terrorism and formation of al-Qaeda, which is infinitely more interesting to read about anyway.As a very provincial, ignorant person who hasnt traveled a lot, I dont know much about Islam or the Arab world and am thus highly susceptible to a romantic Orientalist-type fascination. And so the descriptions in this book of Egypt and Saudi Arabia (and Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and a bunch of other places I cant even vaguely visualize without remedial assistance of the sort provided here) in the mid-to-late twentieth century were instantly riveting to me, as were Wrights patient and highly readable narratives of various key players actions and lives. Partly because the people and places described were so exotic to me, the book had a quality of the mythic to it, and Ill admit that my ignorance and naivite about the rest of the world contributed to my enjoyment of this. For instance, his description of Saudi Arabia at mid-century, just as oil is being discovered, was at least as thrilling and evocative as some fantasy adventure story. The account of Mohammad bin Ladens construction in 1961 of a road uniting the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had all the suspense and narrative power of incredible fiction... and the details of Mohammads polygamous practices were too lurid and insane to have been made up.No, Hollywood with all its big budgets and CGI effects cant compete with this books images of antsy Arab jihadists holed up in Afghanistan, mid-eighties Peshawar filling with the chaos of the Afghan wars overflow, a jihadi/US Army sergeant/al-Qaeda member/would-be CIA agents adventures stateside, a Sudanese generals selling bin Laden fake uranium that was really cinnabar, the shadowy worlds of international intrigues and terrorism and American intelligences determined bureaucratic obstructionism of itself... and of course all the violence, which is so pervasive and twisted and sadistic beyond even the most famously filmed gore. YOU JUST CANT MAKE THIS SHIT UP! Would that we had to...Okay, but Lawrence Wright didnt write his book just to entertain but also to inform. This stuff really did happen, and were supposed to think something about it, I guess. Obviously part of what demands the comparison of this book to fiction is the over-the-top drama of its story: the clash of civilizations apparently driving these men to mass murder for reasons that seem so foreign and incomprehensible to me.I guess the main reason I avoid reading about the 9/11 attacks is that I feel profoundly embarrassed by my nations reaction to them. Not only by our political and military response, but by our cultural processing, and what weve made of these events. Reasons for my discomfort with the political and military stuff is pretty obvious; throughout The Looming Tower, Wright makes clear that a goal of the terrorists was to provoke a repressive response: to make the United States behave more like, say, Egypt, where dissenters and suspected terrorists were rounded up and tortured without any due process, a practice many point to as a factor in Ayman al-Zawahiris increasingly bloodthirsty radicalization. Well uh, yeah -- as the old cliche points out, cliches become cliche for a reason, and the terrorists have won out in many ways, not least in our countrys treatment of suspected terrorists. Score one for the away team!I mean, I really dont want to get into some boring stupid political rant, but reading this did make my own thoughts and feelings about all this stuff clearer to me. In some ways the book had a sort of cartoonish simplicity in its presentation of the battle between good and evil, but the thing is that you cant argue that al-Qaeda and these other similar groups arent purely evil. They are evil. Intentional mass slaughter of innocent civilians is objectively evil, and so painting these guys as two-dimensional Saturday-morning animated villains is not wrong. The only part of the equation thats not so simple is the goodness-of-adversary part, and so maybe the battle is more like evil v. at-least-somewhat-less-evil. But whatever your issues with the United States and our tendency to have robots drop bombs on wedding parties halfway around the world and to perform extraordinary renditions to Syria or whatever, there are some very nice things about living here, such as the Taliban not running our zoo.One thing I remember really clearly about being a kid was watching movies or reading books and always thinking that the bad guys were trying to destroy the good guys based on some misunderstanding -- that if the good guys sat down with the bad guys and they drank some apple juice together, the bad guys would realize that their vendetta was all just a silly mistake. Then I grew up, and came to understand that this was rarely the case. Violent hatred isnt usually based just in miscommunication or a lack of understanding; thats just a comforting myth we tell children because the truth kind of sucks. Its not that al-Qaeda hates me because they dont understand me. If they really knew me and what Im all about, theyd hate me even more than they already do.Anyway, my book report is willfully trying to turn itself into a moronic political rant -- sorry. Where I think I was going was that Wright also emphasizes how badly bin Laden wanted to lure the U.S. into war in Afghanistan, which he envisioned -- after the Russians misadventure there -- as a guaranteed destroyer of empires. Well, it is truly baffling to me why anyone would ever want to fight a war in AFGHANISTAN -- from what I can see this is a country of MUTILATED, DRUG-DEALING TRIBAL WARLORDS WHO ARE PERFECTLY COMFORTABLE BEING SURROUNDED BY LANDMINES, and it seems like youd have to be crazy go fucking around with people like that -- but there we are. Or rather, there are our troops, dealing with God only knows what, while the rest of us sit around at home getting fatter and updating our Apple products and spouting off uninformed opinions in online book reviews and occasionally still making some kind of pious, wounded noise about the excruciatingly painful national tragedy that was 9/11.I mean, thats really why I avoid all the 9/11 stuff, and what I find so uncomfortably embarrassing about it. For me, in many ways what this book was about ultimately was violence, and about cultural understandings of violence and how it can be used. A lot of the things in here shocked me because of the nature of the violence described -- far before we actually got to jihad, the accepted levels of violence in a lot of these cultures was astounding. For instance, okay, yes, we still have the death penalty here, which also shocks me, but in Saudi Arabia -- who are our friends over there (well, more or less, as far as these things go) -- capital punishment is effected through beheading. BEHEADING! HOLY SHIT! Maybe you think its culturally insensitive or something that I consider that more gruesome than lethal injection, but man, I sure do. Thats just one example though: the wider culture that suicide bombers grow out of is one that seems to have a great deal more familiarity -- and thus perhaps, to some extent, comfort -- with actual violence than our own.I say actual violence because there is a pretty great scene in here towards the end when -- I hope Im not getting the details wrong, I cant find it, sorry if this is wrong -- the al-Qaeda guys are sitting around in some caves in Afghanistan watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies to get ideas for their hijackings. One unexpected impact this book, though its good v. evil presentation, had was in making me question my own culture in a different way than I usually do. I was raised to be critical of American values, even while being so obliviously embedded within and formed by them that I couldnt even fully identify what they were. By explicating the terrorists beef with the U.S. in such detail, Wright helped me see better why it is exactly that they hate our freedoms, and what these freedoms are, and of which ingredients is brewed the American Kool Aid is that I was raised on... and remain ideologically committed to drinking.Maybe the amount of sentimentalism and exceptionalism that goes along with American discourse about 9/11 bothers me so much because I secretly feel some of it too. There are embarrassing things about being an American in this era, and the 9/11 stuff makes me feel a lot of them strongly. As I said at the outset, I am provincial and sheltered, and in this I am fairly representative of my countrymen. I havent traveled much, but I lived in New York for several years, and descriptions of mass death there do affect me more than those of even more horrific violence in far-off Afghanistan, Egypt, Algeria, or Kenya.Lately -- before reading this book -- Ive been troubled a lot by the thought that Im not at all brave. One thing that got me started thinking about that was talking to men whod served recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. These guys are very different from most of us Americans in that they have traveled to these places, and have witnessed and participated in violence there. They arent motivated by religious fundamentalism; they go into dangerous situations hoping very much they wont get hurt or die, and I consider that very brave. But -- and I know this is no news flash, every idiot knows this -- while they were over there shooting people and having their convoys blown up we were all just back here buying shoes on the Internet and complaining about gas being expensive and acting like the events of September 11, 2001 were this completely isolated and exceptionally violent event that was so traumatic for all of us that our country just might never recover its emotional bearings. I mean, were so removed from violence that the false memory of its rarity frightens us so badly that we cant even bring our shampoo on the plane. This bums me out so much because I dont want these jihadist assholes to be right about anything. I dont want them to be right thinking that were not brave and that were not a moral nation, but we havent done that great a job proving them wrong in the years since this happened.Okay, this review got away from me and Im just babbling and its really really stupid, and Im sorry, but anyway, bottom line: this is a fantastic book and I couldnt put it down the whole time that I was reading it. Highly recommended, though maybe not for the plane.* * * *Okay, I had to chop off this already overly-long non-review, because I heard the screams of my neighbors and realized the Superbowl had started, so not wanting to be against us I had to run off to that. But now, having patriotically reaffirmed my faith in the greatness of my powerful nation by watching Cee Lo Green and Madonna lip sync Like a Prayer, I thought Id try to wrap up some of my irrelevant and incoherent non-thoughts.Im actually not sure what it is that I was trying to say here about violence. Maybe Im saying that I think we need to be more consistent in our cultural understanding and application of it, but this book could be a warning about the dangers of consistency, which is perhaps not just the hobgoblin of little minds but also the lifeblood of fundamentalism. One thing I think Wright did a really good job of explaining was the lure that these ideas have for men who then blow up themselves and a whole bunch of innocent people. Whats the trade-off, what do they get from it, aside from that rumored afterlife stacked with nubile virgins? Yeah I know these people are real different from the people I know, but they are still people, and I just dont think humans are wired for purely delayed gratification.What they get from fundamentalism -- taken to murderous extremes, sure, but fundamentalism in general -- is the happy comfort of moral clarity, of a simplified world. Me, I just dont know what to make of all this. All the violence, all the pain, all the baffling overwhelming complexity of an insane world. Its hard enough figuring out what to think of any of it, let alone to know how to live every day in a way that doesnt feel like a series of idiotic and self-contradicting mistakes. But if you become one of these jihad guys, such confusion is no longer a problem you face. Theres good, and theres bad, and you know what you must do. And what you must do does seem super batshit crazy and horrible to me, but to you it makes so much sense that youd never even dream of questioning it, and thats gotta feel pretty great... maybe so much that its a feeling worth killing and dying for.But I am still disturbed by our cultures relationship to violence, which seems very hypocritical and problematic to me. Obviously theres something distasteful about letting our enemies define us, but if we are going to play that game and say we stand for the opposite of what they do, then what we stand for, what we do and believe should make sense. If they are for repression and we are for freedom, then we need to be free. If we are against violence, let us be against violence; if we are not against violence, then lets be honest about that, and not cry and whine so much when that violence touches our lives.I dont know, it was easy for the terrorists to be consistent in their actions, because they were fundamentalists: they were willing to die in order to kill (though tellingly, bin Laden expressed in his will that he didnt want his sons to join al-Qaeda: its understandably a lot easier to send someone elses kids off to die, as we see here at home when powerful people happily start wars that their sons wont have to fight). It is a lot harder for a diverse nation of people with wildly different ideas about morality and violence to agree about how were going to see things and respond to something like terrorist acts. But it should start at least with our owning the consequences of our actions -- it should have started with much more responsible media coverage of this last decades wars, for example. I mean thats just an example. I dont really know what else to say about it, except that I thought of some article a few months ago in one of those mainstream weekly news magazines -- Time or Newsweek -- about the United States military and how sealed off in many ways from the rest of the population theyve become. I think thats a really important problem that points to a lot more than just itself. In my experience, it seems to me that a lot of us either tend to be lefty doves, who tend to be naive about certain global realities, or righty hawks, who can be cavalier about the effects of violence. It seems to me that Americans who have fought in the military and people who have grown up in really violent neighborhoods not surprisingly tend to be more realistic and less sentimental about violence, but is that what we want? As this book shows, once you get comfortable with violence things can quickly get horrific and disgusting.Blah blah blah blah. I dont know who Im talking to or what Im saying or why, Im really just babbling -- procrastinating on homework. Sorry.The final thing that I wanted to say about The Looming Tower was that I learned how all the terrorists would blend in and get legal status -- whether in California or Somalia or wherever -- by simply marrying a native woman. THIS SERIOUSLY FREAKED ME THE HELL OUT! Those who know me are aware that I have a reputation for poor judgment when it comes to affairs of the heart, and a weakness for swarthy men with an air of mystery about them... and so what am I supposed to do now with this piece of information!?? If I turn down dates with foreign guys named Muhammad does that mean the terrorists have won?Ah, questions, troubling questions of the post-9/11 world.In any case: a truly great book.
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