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

It's a familiar story, to a point. A young man from a small town leaves home to make his fortune. He's in the right place at the right time; through hard work and skill, he becomes rich beyond his wildest dreams, and raises children who have to contend with their father's complex legacy. Some come to enjoy it; one comes to hate it, with a force that scars the world.

Osama Bin Laden was one of more than 50 children fathered by Mohamed Bin Laden, who left his native Yemen to work on construction projects in the newly established kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Blind in one eye and illiterate, his skill as a builder nevertheless caught the attention of the House of Saud; flush with oil riches, they would make him rich with projects ranging from royal residences to military installations and the country's new road system, and ultimately prestigious renovations of holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. The size of the fortune he would leave to his many children - 2.5 percent for each boy, 1 percent for each girl, an admonishment to set a little aside for their mothers - was, according to Steve Coll, simply incalculable.

Drawing on twenty years of experience as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Steve Coll presents the story of two generations of a family at the collision of ancient Islamic traditions and the rise of Western power. The Bin Ladens were a surprisingly tight-knit family; through shared tastes for Florida real estate and Tabasco sauce - which they had imported by the crate - and decadent vacations to Sweden and Las Vegas, the elder Bin Laden brothers were determined to keep the family unified.

But the dark center of The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century is the story of Osama Bin Laden, and how he became the man that created al Qaeda. He was born to a 15 year old Syrian girl, and a gym teacher introduced him to fundamentalist Islam in high school; religious belief and his role in the family business took him to Afghanistan, where he supplied guns for Arab militants against the Soviet Army. But unlike his family, he could not reconcile the pursuit of Western profits with his religion; his rage at the Saudi royal family and their American ties would eventually force the rest of the Bin Ladens to choose between their brother and their patrons, sending Osama into exile - and on the road to 9/11.

Steve Coll
Steve Coll is President & CEO of New America Foundation, and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Previously he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper's managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He is author six books, including The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the SEC's battle with Wall Street (with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008).

Mr. Coll's professional awards include two Pulitzer Prizes. He won the first of these, for explanatory journalism, in 1990, for his series, with David A. Vise, about the SEC. His second was awarded in 2005, for his book, Ghost Wars, which also won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross award; the Overseas Press Club award and the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book published on international affairs during 2004. Other awards include the 1992 Livingston Award for outstanding foreign reporting; the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone; and a second Overseas Press Club Award for international magazine writing. Mr. Coll graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude, from Occidental College in 1980 with a degree in English and history. He lives in Washington, D.C.