On Wednesday 23 April, Steve Coll will launch his new book entitled The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and its Fortune from 1.30pm.
Synopsis
The rise and rise of the Bin Laden family is one of the great stories of the twentieth century: the repercussions of that rise have, of course, already deeply marked the twenty-first. And yet it is a story that has never been properly told. Their affairs shrouded in secrecy, living in one of the most powerful, closed, unaccountable countries on earth, the Bin Ladens have – until now – successfully fended off all attempts to understand the world from which Osama sprang.
Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens is a history of a family and its fortune: of how a young illiterate Yemeni bricklayer, Mohammed Bin Laden, went to the new oil-rich country of Saudi Arabia and quickly became a vital figure in its development, building great mosques and highways and making himself and his many children into millionaires. It is the story of the Saudi royal family, who the Bin Ladens served loyally, and without whose capricious favour they would have been nothing. And it is the story of the revolutions in a country founded on extreme religious purity becoming awash with oil money and dazzled by the temptations of the West. In only two generations the Bin Ladens moved from a desert canyon to luxury jets, yachts and private compounds around the world, even financing Hollywood movies. These religious and cultural extremes resulted in everything from enthusiasm for the West – exemplified by Osama’s free-living pilot brother Salem – to an overwhelming determination to destroy it.
Steve Coll is most recently the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Ghost Wars. He also won a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. He covered Afghanistan and the Washington Post’s South Asia bureau chief between 1989 and 1992 and was the Washington Post’s managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He is now staff writer at the New Yorker. He is the author of five books, including On the Grand Trunk Road and The Taking of Getty Oil. He lives with his wife and three children in Maryland.
Copies of the book will be available at a discounted price at the event: cash sales only.
The meeting will be Chaired by Dr Dana Allin (IISS Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Affairs and Editor of Survival) and will be held on the Fifth Floor at Arundel House, 13-15 Arundel Street, Temple Place, London WC2R 3DX.
If you would like to attend, please RSVP Kathleen James on james@iiss.org or tel. 020 7395 9109
