Book Review: The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright (2006)

In the flood of books written after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower claims a place near the top of the heap in terms of depth, importance, thoroughness, and readability. It joins The Age of Sacred Terror (2002), by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, as an essential book on the topic.

Subtitled Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, The Looming Tower deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. It is a rich historical narrative that traces the emergence of Islamic extremism from its roots in the early 1900's to the fateful fall of 2001.

Author Lawrence Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University, combines exhaustive research with a wonderful writing style. His research is evidenced by a list of more than 500 people interviewed in preparing this book; a 12 page Bibliography listing more than 200 reference books and documents; and more than 50 pages of Notes. This is as close to an academic study of the events leading up to the attacks of 9/11 as we are likely going to get.

Wright's key challenge is packaging the research into a cohesive and engaging story, and this he achieves brilliantly. The lives of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of modern Islamic extremism; Osama Bin Laden, founder of Al-Qaeda; and Ayman al-Zawihiri, founder of al-Jihad and ultimately Bin Laden's partner, emerge out of the shadows and into full colour. We get to know not only these men, but their homes, parents, wives, children, associates, influences, and evolving motivations.

Key transformational events that lead to the radicalization of Islam's fringes and Al-Qaeda's emergence are revealed. Wright takes us into the key towns, meetings, battles, prisons, interrogation rooms and training camps as critical events unfold over several decades. The environment that surrounded each man and event is brought to life to provide a rich context, and the result is a most well-rounded description of the path to radicalization.

The final one third of the book places Al-Qaeda somewhat in the background, and brings to the forefront the story of the key FBI, CIA, and National Security Council agents who had the best opportunity to stop the attacks of 9/11. Wright excels again by providing a gripping account of the brutal inter-agency battles that prevented the dots from being connected.

Despite the mounting evidence from the brazen attacks on the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the USS Cole, the lack of cooperation between the FBI and CIA allows Al-Qaeda to proceed virtually unimpeded with the planning and execution of the attacks on US soil. Wright neatly describes all the dots that were available, and reveals the reasons why the connecting lines were never drawn.

FBI agent John O'Neill was one of the few to understand the gravity of the Al-Qaeda threat, and he most ironically died at the World Trade Centre after having retired from the FBI mere days before the attack. He takes centre stage in the story of the counter-terrorism intelligence efforts. Wright succeeds in painting a full portrait of O'Neill's larger-than-life personality, and a career spent battling large bureaucracies, personal enemies and internal demons.

The Looming Tower is a rare achievement: an essential, well-written, multi-dimensional history of critical events spanning several decades and occurring across the globe.


421 pages, plus Principle Characters, Notes, Bibliography, and Index.
Published in softcover by Vintage Books, a division of Random House.






Ace Black Blog Book Review No. 32.
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Book Review: 747, by Joe Sutter (2006)

Joe Sutter was the head of the team that developed the 747 Jumbo Jet at Boeing, in the late 1960's and early 1970's. As the first twin-aisle widebody jet, the 747 revolutionized both passenger travel and air freight shipments around the globe. The 747 spawned a host of variants and derivatives, customized for specific uses, and remains in production today.

Sutter's book provides excellent insight into the aviation industry, and although the story of the 747 is the central focus of the book, Sutter nicely places his career in perspective with several childhood stories that establish his early love for aviation engineering. He grew up a stone's throw away from Boeing's airfields in Seattle, and during his childhood observed the latest innovations in airline design, both successful and not so successful, taking off, landing (or sometimes crashing), and being tested literally at his doorstep.

He also provides insight into his experience in World War II, and his role as a young engineer on many of the significant jets that were developed at Boeing prior to the 747, such as the 707 and the 727. From his earlier experiences he highlights the critical lessons learned in people management skills as well as in overcoming some of the most difficult aeronautical challenges of the jet age.

Sutter manages the difficult task of describing highly technical issues in language that is accessible but that remains respectful of the engineering involved. He also excels in telling the specific story of the 747's development, recounting the corporate, technical, and personal challenges that had to be patiently overcome, and explaining how some of the most critical decisions came about. Highlights include deciding to develop a widebody instead of the widely expected double-decker, and the challenge of building one of the largest, most complex and most successful jets ever while actually being perceived as the distant third priority at Boeing -- a company which happened to be at the brink of bankruptcy.

Sutter was obviously a brilliant engineer and a highly effective team leader and problem solver. In his eighties when he put this story on paper, the book is written in a functional engineer's style, and although Jay Spenser is credited as a co-writer, 747 the book would have benefited from a lot more editing to add the artistic storytelling flavour that is clearly not Sutter's strength -- and to eliminate some endless repetition. The story of the 747's development is filled with larger-than-life secondary characters (including the heads of Boeing and Pan American Airlines) and critical, tense events that are unfortunately portrayed in the book for the most part with a bland dryness that can only be conjured up by an engineer.

Sutter's story is an embodiment of many of the principles described in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. The confluence of events that resulted in him being placed at the helm of the 747 program, from his date and place of birth to the experience that he gained on the earliest Boeing jet airliners, ensured that he was in charge of a remarkable achievement and delivered an extraordinarily successful airplane that positively affected the lives of millions around the globe.

Subtitled: Creating The World's First Jumbo Jet And Other Adventures From A Life In Aviation. 265 pages plus Index. Published in paperback by Smithsonian Books - Collins.





Ace Black Blog Book Review No. 31.
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