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

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century | Steve Coll | Important and Valuable Read on Globalization's Trappings

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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 25 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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Biography of Family

Steve Coll's latest book, The Bin Ladens, is an excellent successor to his previous, Ghost Wars, about the wars in Afghanistan over the last 30 years. With excellent prose and well researched documentation, Coll provides rich detail on an otherwise unknown history. Specifically, that the family that bread the terrorist who committed the worst attack on US soil has also contributed a significant amount of business development in the Middle East and the United States.

Coll's thesis is that the Bin Laden family, beginning with the family patriarch Muhammad Bin Laden in the early 20th century, created a large amount of wealth and developed multiple personalities at the same time as the United States and especially Saudi Arabia.

The Bin Laden's have leaned heavily on early connections established with the royal family of Saudi Arabia. As Saudi Arabia grew with the discovery of oil, the riches of the family also grew with the accumulation of construction contracts. As their wealth grew, they also became more interested in more cosmopolitan pursuits. And as these pursuits expanded, many of the family gravitated towards the most economically vibrant country during the Cold War, the United States.

As with any large institution, different wings grew up in the family. A religiously conservative wing of course developed, and Osama was a member of this wing. However, a liberal, open minded wing also developed.

Overall, Steve Coll has put together much research that is likely unknown to many in the west. This excellent book should be on the reading lists of many who are trying to understand how this one particular family developed the way they did, and how the roots of Osama Bin Laden are also intertwined with the incredible economic development of both the West and the oil rich Middle East.

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Important and Valuable Read on Globalization's Trappings

With his "The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century" Steve Coll has written something relevant and valuable. In his meticulous reporting of a powerful Middle Eastern family that spawned the world's most famous terrorist Steve Coll has, more important, revealed the trappings of globalization.

The Bin Ladens is the Saud royal family's contractors, and they have literally built most of Saudi Arabia. They are a large and expansive, devout and traditional Muslim family but before anything else they are businessmen. That's why they will assiduously cultivate good relations with the corrupt and tyrannical Saud royal family, whose very whim rests the fate of the family. They will also tear down and bulldoze to a fault the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and transfer their capital and assets out of Saudi Arabia in times of uncertainty. By being absolutely loyal to the Saud royal family, even acting as one of their largest creditors, the Bin Ladens has prospered, even though because their private and business dealings are so blurred together and because the thorny web of personal relationships that constitute business in Saudi Arabia means everyone owe and is owed money to someone else, they have no idea how much they're worth.

As a mighty tome this book discusses many topics but ultimately it's about, as the subtitle suggests, the Bin Ladens and globalization. And while this is a family epic the patriarch was much too prodigious (fathering at least 54 children), and the story centers around two Bin Laden scions: the eldest and heir Salem and his younger half-brother Osama.

Sent to English boarding schools at a young age the very large and personable Salem, as the heir apparent to this family's construction empire, must have learned quickly that wealth in a global free market means he can live his life like a wet dream. After his father died Salem did much to globalize his company, and retained many foreigners -- lawyers and advisors, pilots and girlfriends -- in his retinue. Yet, out of necessity, Salem was staunchly loyal to the Saud royal family, even doing intelligence work for them -- such as supplying the mujahedeen arms, money, and Osama in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Freely moving between the West and his homeland Salem's ultimate dream was to have four Western women from different countries as his wives: for him this was the true meaning of globalization.

Osama Bin Laden led a very different life from Salem. His mother had him when she was fifteen, and, because there were so many wives already in the Bin Laden household and as was the custom, she re-married, and it was in junior high that the Osama became involved tangentially with the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Islam. At that time many young boys in Saudi Arabia were drawn to radical Islam, and it's possible that like fatherless black teenagers in New York who joined gangs they were drawn in because they desperately wanted authority and structure in their lives. When Middle Eastern patriarchs decide to have dozens of sons they in fact sentence all of them to a fatherless existence. And while Osama had a kind stepfather his Bin Laden name meant he was in fact superior to his stepfather, and therefore could never look up to him.

Besides providing Osama with structure and order Islam also sated his second most immediate need: sex. Islam permitted Osama at 17 to marry a younger cousin of 14, and would permit him to marry three more times. And fighting the jihad in Afghanistan Osama may have been motivated by yet another mundane reason: respect from his half-brothers. The Saudi royal family supported the war, and thus the Bin Laden family supported the war -- and here was an opportunity for Osama to finally prove himself to the Bin Ladens. Ultimately, it did not but in Afghanistan he created a new family for himself: Al-Qaeda.

"Ambition, energy, natural talent, and a gift for managing people had made [the patriarch] Mohamed Bin Laden wealthy," Steve Coll writes. "Reinterpreted by Salem, these characteristics had girded a secular life of singular creativity and financial success. Reinterpreted through a prism of Islamic radicalism by Osama, they would soon prove just as transforming."

And what Osama realized was that the very tools of globalization -- mobile phones, Internet, and international finance -- could be used against globalization itself with devastating effect.

Unfortunately, globalization's prophets were so enamored of their creation they could not imagine this was possible. During the late Clinton administration federal agents tried to ascertain the funds available to Osama by hacking into Swiss banks but their overlords overruled this, arguing this would compromise confidence in the European banking system.

What was so traumatic about the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks was not the degree of damage but how it shattered our very sense of the world -- of what is fixed, true, and right. By turning the very symbols of modernity and globalization against itself Osama Bin Laden showed how messy and precarious our world really is, and that's a sort of metaphysical trauma almost impossible to recover from.

Globalization indeed is a messy and complicated process, as the Bin Laden family would discover. Yes, globalization meant cheap access to German prostitutes and German cars but it also brought many complications. While in America Bin Laden family members were swindled out of their money, and harassed by the police about if they were treating their household help properly. When one Bin Laden son found himself in American divorce court, and constantly harassed about his actual finances -- which he knew nothing about -- by his wife's divorce lawyers he yearned for the ease and simplicity of patriarchal Muslim law. Not at all strange that while reared in modern and progressive Western society most Bin Laden sons in the end chose the comfort and certainty of their corrupt and close-minded homeland.

Globalization, like the Internet and modernity, is neither good nor bad. It just is -- it promises and it imperils, it strengthens and weakens, it creates and destroys. Many are turned off by globalization's inherent messiness and complication, and thus it's not surprising many -- in every society -- will seek comfort and consolation in religion, the simplest and most dogmatic thing available to them.

And so Osama Bin Laden is not globalization's enemy. He is, like his other brother Salem and like the Bin Laden family and like all of us, ensnared and overwhelmed by globalization, desperately trying in his own way to best make sense of it.

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An invaluable guide

Steve Coll's THE BIN LADENS receives Erik Singer's smooth voice and Broadway experience as it tells of the rise of the Bin Laden family and the oil fortune which earned them a place in not just the Middle East, but in Western history as well. Concurrent with the family biography is a survey of global integration and interactions key to understanding world politics - and an invaluable guide.

The Bin Ladins: The Rise to Power

This book provides a glamorous insight into the life of the Bin Laden family from the early beginning. Details within this book might seem over exaggerated but most likely very real. A dazzling narrative of high stakes business/borderline politics that brought about the most powerful family in the Middle East.

This book brings you on a journey across many continents leaving a dizzying trail of foot prints. A journey made possible by Oil, Construction, fortune and pure ambition.

This is a long book, but will remain in your hands until the last page.

A second addition would be appreciated to bridge current events to where this book left off.

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Amaze your friends on how much you know about the Bin Ladens!

I started reading this book mainly because the author is a pulz prize winner. I started it back in April. Mind you I am a slow reader but this is one that I can't put down. I remember after 9/11 hearing that the Bin Laden family had been flown out the next day or so by Bush. But I didn't know anything about them. Except they were allowed to fly but I was stuck in Essen Germany (one of the pilots has lived there w/ his girlfriend). This book is drenched in so much information that Steve gathered. I cannot imagine how hard or frustrating it must have been to get people there to talk. I have been taking my time and absorbing it (and even highlighting names...like James Baker). I had no idea and I don't think most American's how intertwined the Bin Laden family is with the U.S. They own so many properties all over the country. Even in the small city I live in now and the city I just moved from. It was also interesting to read about the Gulf War since I am a vet that was in during the gulf war. I remember that the king of Saudi told Bush he wanted to give every service member a solid gold metal. Every one of us. We were soooo excited. Bush said no. So nice of him. I mean my younger brother was on foodstamps while he was an e-3 in the Navy and I was barely clearing 12 grand as an e4. Nah that couldn't have come in handy. It is also interesting to see that money from the U.S. came through CIA to one of the main operatives there that passed on money to Obama and he never knew we gave him money. This was during the Afgan war. I could go on and on but JUST BUY IT!

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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