Osama: The Making of a Terrorist is not so much another biography of old beardie as a worldly and suave example of a once thriving subclass of literature, the newspaper correspondent’s memoir.
Born in Buffalo, New York on ‘the day President Roosevelt closed the banks’ in 1933, Jonathan Randal reported for 40 years on the wars of the post-colonial era, beginning with the struggle for independence in Algeria in the 1950s and ending with Bosnia in the 1990s. For most of that time, he was correspondent for the Washington Post.
His earlier books, which are both recommended, were about distinctive peoples living outside the mainstream of Muslim life: the Maronite Christians of Lebanon (The Tragedy of Lebanon, 1983) and the Kurds in the mountains of Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria (After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?, 1997). Osama was the project of Randal’s retirement in Paris.
Here is the familiar story of Osama Binladen’s life: half-privileged, half-neglected origins in the immense Binladen clan in Saudi Arabia; service fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s; return to Saudi Arabia and quarrel with the Saudi royal family; exile in Sudan; Afghanistan again; attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001; disappearance from view in the fighting at Tora Bora in south-eastern Afghanistan in December, 2001
There is nothing new, by way of fact or legend, to add to last year’s official 9/11 Commission Report or such books as Peter L.
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