I’m currently reading Pulitzer-winning writer Steve Coll’s superb The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
This book was handed to me by a friend months ago; she was just bursting with enthusiasm about it. You must read this, fascinating, riveting, etc., etc. I took it as the polite thing to do. But after reading some of Coll’s recent commentary on Afghanistan in The New Yorker (where he writes and blogs, see below), I finally picked up the book over the weekend.
My friend was right. The book is fascinating; it is riveting. Coll tells the story of the poor Yemeni immigrant Muhammad Bin Laden, a man who built a construction company in Saudi Arabia out of nothing over a 35-year-period before dying in a plane crash in 1967. Along the way he also fathered (by official count) 54 children, among them Osama (son number 17, more or less.)
Osama was just 9 when his father died, the sole child from that marriage (his mother had four other children with her second husband — altogether Osama Bin Laden had 57 half-siblings). The Bin Laden family, under the domination of much older half-brother Salem, whose story is a major part of the book, grew richer and more tied to the west, as did Saudi Arabia. Osama turned to more radical Islam and violence, ultimately forcing a break with his family, repudiation and — in 1994 — the loss of his Saudi citizenship. The rest, as they say, is history.
Steve Coll won a journalism Pulitzer for his work on the SEC and a nonfiction Pulitzer for Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. He makes his excellent observations and commentary about Afghanistan and Pakistan in the pages of The New Yorker and at the New Yorker blog Think Tank.