The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Wright traces the rise of al-Qaeda from Sayyid Qutb's radicalization in 1940s Colorado to the morning of September 11, showing how FBI-CIA turf wars and bureaucratic failures let the plot succeed. Won the Pulitzer. The research took five years and five hundred interviews. It reads like a thriller whose ending you already know and still can't believe.
Wright narrates contested intelligence history with a novelist's confidence, and the choices show: John O'Neill gets a doomed-hero arc tidier than his messy career, and the FBI-versus-CIA blame line is ruled straighter than the evidence can hold. The Qutb-to-bin-Laden genealogy grips, and is a little too clean: a single road where there were many.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
