The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright.
Probably the best-written account of the terrorist group’s origins and the nexus of radical personalities at its center, Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account is mostly a painstaking record of bureaucratic failure: Notably, the CIA was aware for more than a year that two of the group’s operatives were in the US — information it delivered to the FBI on Sept. 12, 2001.
The book is told primarily through the lives of four individuals, Wright told The New Yorker in 2006: Saudi construction scion Osama bin Laden; his Egyptian deputy and personal physician Ayman al-Zawahiri; former Saudi intelligence head Prince Turki al-Faisal; and FBI agent John O’Neill. Buy The Looming Tower from your local bookstore.