The Bin Ladens Hardback - 2008 - 1st Edition

by Coll, Steve

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the national bestsellerGhost Wars, Steve Coll presents the story of the Bin Laden family'srise to power and privilege, revealing new information to show howAmerican influences changed the family and how one member'srebellion changed America

The Bin Ladens rose from poverty to privilege; theyloyally served the Saudi royal family for generations and thenone of their number changed history on September 11, 2001.Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll tells the epic storyof the rise of the Bin Laden family and of the wildly diverselifestyles of the generation to which Osama bin Laden belongs,and against whom he rebelled. Starting with the family's escapefrom famine at the beginning of the twentieth century throughits jet-set era in America after the 1970s oil boom, and finallyto the family's attempts to recover from September 11, The BinLadens unearths extensive new material about the family andits relationship with the United States, and provides a richlyrevealing and emblematic narrative of our globally interconnectedtimes.

To a much greater extent than has been previouslyunderstood, the Bin Laden family owned an impressiveshare of the America upon which Osama ultimately declaredwar shopping centers, apartment complexes, luxury estates,privatized prisons in Massachusetts, corporate stocks, an airport,and much more. They financed Hollywood movies andnegotiated over real estate with Donald Trump. They came toregard George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Prince Charlesas friends of their family. And yet, as was true of the largerrelationship between the Saudi and American governments,when tested by Osama's violence, the family's involvement inthe United States proved to be narrow and brittle.

Among the many memorable figures that cross thesepages is Osama's older brother, Salem a free-living, chainsmoking,guitar-strumming pilot, adventurer, and businessmanwho cavorted across America and Europe and once proposedmarriage 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 anotherforce in the narrative an illiterate bricklayer who created thefamily fortune through perspicacity and wit, until his suddendeath in an airplane crash in 1967, an accident caused by anerror by his American pilot.

At the story's heart lies an immigrant family'sattempt to adapt simultaneously to Saudi Arabia's puritanismand America's myriad temptations. The family generation towhich Osama belonged twenty-five brothers and twenty-ninesisters had to cope with intense change. Most of them wereborn into a poor society where religion dominated public life.Yet by the time they became young adults, these Bin Ladensfound themselves bombarded by Western-influenced ideasabout individual choice, by gleaming new shopping malls andinternational fashion brands, by Hollywood movies and changingsexual mores a dizzying world that was theirs for the taking,because they each received annual dividends that started inthe hundreds of thousands of dollars. How they navigated thesedemands is an authentic, humanizing story of Saudi Arabia,America, and the sources of attraction and repulsion still presentin the countries' awkward embrace.