Michael Burleigh
Times of Terror
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda’s Road to 9/11
By Lawrence Wright
Allen Lane / Penguin Press 469pp £20 order from our bookshop
Celsius 7/7: How the West’s Policy of Appeasement Has Provoked Yet More Fundamentalist Terror – and What Has To Be Done Now
By Michael Gove
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 153pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
The fifth anniversary of 9/11 has inevitably seen a spate of books and television films, most notably Touchstone Productions’ outstanding The Path to 9/11 (outstanding because of its honest depiction of Islamist psychopaths), which was shown on BBC2, and Melanie Phillips’s impassioned Londonistan (Gibson Square).
While his interviews with a cast of thousands do not enable journalist Lawrence Wright substantially to increase our knowledge, as a first-rate reporter, familiar with several Third World hellholes, and a skilful writer, he succeeds brilliantly in humanising all the principal actors who came together on the morning of 9/11.
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