Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower””Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 [Archives:2007/1086/Reportage]”

Andrian Kreye
American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright makes the history of Islamism sound like a political thriller. Andrian Kreye has read the book, which is considered by experts to be the definitive work on the prehistory of 9/11

Some stories simply have to be told more than once. One such story is that of the sheer irresistible attraction of Islamism, which began to ferment in Cairo in the 1930s and came to a head for the first time in New York on 9/11. Hardly anyone understands this story as well and can tell it as brilliantly as Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the American weekly magazine The New Yorker.

Wright may not have been the first author to tell this tale, but his book, “The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11″” is nonetheless a milestone.

Not a natural born entertainer

It is also quite literally an event. Last summer