The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century - Hardcover

Coll, Steve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594201641 ISBN 13: 9781594201646

Publisher: Penguin Press, 2008

Synopsis

The rise and rise of the Bin Laden family is one of the great stories of the twentieth century; its repercussions have already deeply marked the twenty-first. Until now, however, it is a story that has never been fully told, as the Bin Ladens have successfully fended off attempts to understand the family circles from which Osama sprang. In this the family has been abetted by the kingdom it calls home, Saudi Arabia, one of the most closed societies on earth.

Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century is the groundbreaking history of a family and its fortune. It chronicles a young illiterate Yemeni bricklayer, Mohamed Bin Laden, who went to the new, oil-rich country of Saudi Arabia and quickly became a vital figure in its development, building great mosques and highways and making himself and many of his children millionaires. It is also a story of the Saudi royal family, whom the Bin Ladens served loyally and without whose capricious favor they would have been nothing. And it is a story of tensions and contradictions in a country founded on extreme religious purity, which then became awash in oil money and dazzled by the temptations of the West. In only two generations the Bin Ladens moved from a famine-stricken desert canyon to luxury jets, yachts, and private compounds around the world, even going into business with Hollywood celebrities. These religious and cultural gyrations resulted in everything from enthusiasm for America—exemplified by Osama’s free-living pilot brother Salem—to an overwhelming determination to destroy it.

The Bin Ladens is a meticulously researched, colorful, shocking, entertaining, and disturbing narrative of global integration and its limitations. It encapsulates the unsettling contradictions of globalization in the story of a single family who has used money, mobility, and technology to dramatically varied ends.

About this title

About the Author

Steve Coll is most recently the author of the New York Times bestseller The Bin Ladens. He is the president of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute headquartered in Washington, D.C., and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Previously heworked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of six other books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Ghost Wars.

From AudioFile

How do you keep a nonfiction audio that spans three generations and four continents worth hearing? First, you find a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who knows how to blend story, fact, and politics into readability. Like Steve Coll. Then you find a reader who keeps the narration moving, emphasizes the historical drama, and delivers Saudi names, titles, and places seamlessly. Like Erik Singer. Beginning with the family patriarch, Mohammed, the book traces how his poverty in the southern Yemen desert and menial Saudi jobs ended in engineering feats and a fortune for the 50 children he leaves behind to carry on the bin Laden traditions. Some are in Saudi telecommunications and construction, others in real estate around the world, and one is incubating a cult of martyrdom in Afghanistan. S.W. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1594201641
• ISBN 13: 9781594201646
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 671