Osama bin Laden 'The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,' by Lawrence Wright

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Review by DEXTER FILKINS

What a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. "The Looming Tower" is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve, and carried along by villains and heroes that only a crime novelist could dream up. It's an education, too — though you'd never know it — a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today. The portrait of John O'Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone. And he has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Muhammad Omar and all the rest of them. They come alive.


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'Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography,' by David S. Brown
Review by SAM TANENHAUS

At his death in 1970, Richard Hofstadter was probably this country's most renowned historian, best known as the originator of the "consensus" school, whose measured siftings of the American past de-emphasized conflict — whether economic, regional or ideological — and highlighted instead the nation's long tradition of shared ideas, principles and values.

This school had a limited shelf life, but Hofstadter's work has outlived it, owing to the clarity and nuance of his thought and his talent for drawing parallels between disparate episodes in our national narrative, almost always bringing the argument around to the concerns of midcentury America. Indeed so immersed was Hofstadter in the complications of postwar liberalism that he came finally to dramatize them, not only in his work but also in his life. This is the story David S. Brown tells in "Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography." (NYT.August-06,2006)