Mary Habeck, Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, strategic and security issues and American defence policy, chooses five books on terrorism it wouldn't hurt to read.
From the piece...
Tell me about The Looming Tower.
This is a fantastic account of the origins of al Qaeda, the individuals who laid the foundations of the organisation and why they carried out 9/11. It is the best work on the origins and development of al Qaeda in the 1990s. He uses interviews conducted in the 1990s and he also uses captured documents and materials that he integrated after 9/11. The government started releasing documents after 2002 and I’m going to use a lot of them for my next book.
The other thing about Lawrence Wright is that he has a very compelling writing style. He shows in a very comprehensive way that the al Qaeda groups had a very coherent concept of what they hoped to achieve and that they were doing all this completely under the radar – only a handful of Americans knew what was going on. The fervour on the one hand and the ignorance on the other is startling.
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