The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century | Steve Coll

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century | Steve Coll | An Excellent Overview of the Bin Laden Family

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The Bin Ladens: An...

	The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century Steve Coll Penguin Press HC, The, 2008 - 688 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the national bestseller Ghost Wars, Steve Coll presents the story of the Bin Laden family?s rise to power and privilege, revealing new information to show how American influences changed the family and how one member?s rebellion changed America

The Bin Ladens rose from poverty to privilege; they loyally served the Saudi royal family for generations?and then one of their number changed history on September 11, 2001. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll tells the epic story of the rise of the Bin Laden family and of the wildly diverse lifestyles of the generation to which Osama bin Laden belongs, and against whom he rebelled. Starting with the family?s escape from famine at the beginning of the twentieth century through its jet-set era in America after the 1970s oil boom, and finally to the family?s attempts to recover from September 11, The Bin Ladens unearths extensive new material about the family and its relationship with the United States, and provides a richly revealing and emblematic narrative of our globally interconnected times.

To a much greater extent than has been previously understood, the Bin Laden family owned an impressive share of the America upon which Osama ultimately declared war?shopping centers, apartment complexes, luxury estates, privatized prisons in Massachusetts, corporate stocks, an airport, and much more. They financed Hollywood movies and negotiated over real estate with Donald Trump. They came to regard George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Prince Charles as friends of their family. And yet, as was true of the larger relationship between the Saudi and American governments, when tested by Osama?s violence, the family?s involvement in the United States proved to be narrow and brittle.

Among the many memorable figures that cross these pages is Osama?s older brother, Salem?a free-living, chainsmoking, guitar-strumming pilot, adventurer, and businessman who cavorted across America and Europe and once proposed marriage to four American and European girlfriends simultaneously, attempting to win a bet with the king of Saudi Arabia. Osama and Salem?s father, Mohamed bin Laden, is another force in the narrative?an illiterate bricklayer who created the family fortune through perspicacity and wit, until his sudden death in an airplane crash in 1967, an accident caused by an error by his American pilot.

At the story?s heart lies an immigrant family?s attempt to adapt simultaneously to Saudi Arabia?s puritanism and America?s myriad temptations. The family generation to which Osama belonged?twenty-five brothers and twenty-nine sisters?had to cope with intense change. Most of them were born into a poor society where religion dominated public life. Yet by the time they became young adults, these Bin Ladens found themselves bombarded by Western-influenced ideas about individual choice, by gleaming new shopping malls and international fashion brands, by Hollywood movies and changing sexual mores?a dizzying world that was theirs for the taking, because they each received annual dividends that started in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. How they navigated these demands is an authentic, humanizing story of Saudi Arabia, America, and the sources of attraction and repulsion still present in the countries? awkward embrace.

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Reads Like a Novel

Steve Coll has written another scholarly, extremely well-researched book - this one about the Bin Laden family. I dare any reader to be able to put it down. For me, at least, the mark of a great non-fiction book is that the author is actually informing the reader of events, past and present, while keeping the reader so entertained, that they are unaware that they are in fact in the middle of a fantastic history lesson.

There are many lessons to be learned from reading this book and I did not want this brilliant piece of writing to end.

An Excellent Overview of the Bin Laden Family

Muhammad bin Laden was a poor construction worker from Hadhramawt Yemen, who was forced into exile to find work and prosperity. What he discovered was a gold-mine of work opportunity with the Saudi royal family, and connections that would allow him to renovate the holy mosques in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. With 54 children and over 100 living descendants, the task of writing a family history of the Bin Laden family is quite daunting. Nonetheless, Steve Coll does an exceptional job in telling not only about the most famous Bin Laden, Mohammed, but also about the most infamous, Osama, as well as some of his prominent elder brothers, such as Salem (the eldest), Bakr, Yeslam, as well as some of the female family members and in-laws, Randa and Carmen. Coll's book is an expansive history of two generations, Muhammad and his children, with some attention to the third generation, as well as insight into their relationship with the Saudi royal family. Highly recommended to those wishing to understand Osama or his family, this book will portray a quite varied and diverse family, from those most secular to those who were most religiously observant.

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Must read for every American

Short and sweet, this is a book every American should read. It offers an insight to Saudi Arabia, the house of Al-Saud, the Bin Laden family, and the middle east as a whole. This book might be long, but it is an easy and enjoyable read.

The Bin ladens

Must read for all Americans, gives a detailed history on living and growing up in the Middle East, most American have little understanding fo the culture and lifestyle in these countries.

Nothing much to add

Peterson's review is very good and captures the essence of the book. There is a good deal of information about the Saudi Monarchy in this book that can fill out reading from other sources. It's a poignant story at times evoking the normal tragedies of life in the early deaths of Mohamed, the founder of the dynasty and his heir, Salem. Mr. Coll has a gift for narrative non-ficiton and weaves the constant theme of aviation into the Bin Laden story as well as the destructive side of their construction business. It is a fascinating study of the Bin Ladin family and of Saudi Arabia as it grew into the twentieth century. As he did with Ghost Wars, Mr. Coll has produced another great book.

I will plug Frontier of Faith here for a further study of where the battle formed and rages between Islam's radical arm and the West.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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