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From Publishers Weekly
The bin Ladens are famous for spawning the world's foremost terrorist and building one of the Middle East's foremost corporate dynasties. Pulitzer Prize–winner Coll (Ghost Wars) delivers a sprawling history of the multifaceted clan, paying special attention to its two most emblematic members. Patriarch Mohamed's eldest son, Salem, was a caricature of the self-indulgent plutocrat: a flamboyant jet-setter dependent on the Saudi monarchy, obsessed with all things motorized (he died crashing his plane after a day's joy-riding atop motorcycle and dune-buggy) and forever tormenting his entourage with off-key karaoke. Coll presents quite a contrast with an unusually nuanced profile of Salem's half-brother Osama, a shy, austere, devout man who nonetheless shares Salem's egomania. Other bin Ladens crowd Coll's narrative with the eye-glazing details of their murky business deals, messy divorces and ill-advised perfume lines and pop CDs. Beneath the clutter one discerns an engrossing portrait of a family torn between tradition and modernity, conformism and self-actualization, and desperately in search of its soul. (April 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Milton Viorst

Change the names and locations, and Steve Coll's marvelous book about the bin Laden family would begin like a familiar American saga. An illiterate youth arrives in a land of opportunity from his impoverished homeland and, by dint of ambition, talent and hard work, becomes immensely rich and powerful. He collects properties, airplanes, luxury cars and women -- tastes he passes on to his sons. He earns a niche in the pantheon of great builders of his adopted country.

The youth is Mohamed bin Laden, justly venerated in Saudi Arabia. But collective memory plays funny tricks, and in the West he will be permanently remembered as the father of Osama. The bin Ladens, though their Horatio Alger story overlaps Western experience, emerge as unmistakably Middle Eastern -- to the point of being torn asunder by today's religious struggles. Coll, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Washington Post managing editor, leaves the psychology to his readers. He prefers writing on economics and politics, leavening them with anecdotes and gossip; the result is a fascinating panorama of a great family, presented within the context of the 9/11 drama.

Blind in one eye, not quite 30, Mohamed bin Laden emigrated from Yemen between the world wars, just as the Saudi oil boom was getting underway, and found a job as a bricklayer with Aramco, the Arabian American oil company. More than a good worker, he was an organizer, with an innate sense of business and engineering, and in 1935 he was helped by his employer to set up his own firm. Successful in building homes for princes, he won the notice of the king and erected one of the first royal residences. From there he advanced to the luxury palaces for which the ruling House of Saud is known, then to creation of the country's road network. He renovated the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina, and went off to restore Jerusalem's Mosque of Omar. He also built military installations to assure the Saud dynasty's security.

Like the Saudi royals, Mohamed bin Laden was rigorous in prayer but liberal in interpreting the Koran's sexual strictures. He married countless times, occasionally for business reasons, often out of whimsy, sometimes to women he kept with him, usually to women he legally divorced. In 1958 alone, his wives gave birth to seven children, among them Osama, whose mother was a 15-year-old Syrian from whom Mohamed quickly split. He fathered at least 54 offspring before he died in 1967, in a plane crash during the inspection of a construction site in the desert.

Although he acquired his children casually, Mohamed took his responsibility to them seriously. It was impossible to calculate his net worth, Coll writes, given the indifference to financial management in Saudi Arabia; the royal family alone may have owed him $100 million, which it would pay at its pleasure. But, following Islamic law, he willed each of his 25 sons 2.7 percent of his company's assets, while each daughter received 1 percent. These bequests assured them the means to finish their education and live comfortably, with a small surplus to help out their divorced mothers, who under Islamic law received nothing.

Still, contrary to popular notions, the bin Laden heirs were not born hugely rich. Most of the males went to work in the family company, where they gradually built fortunes. Osama, Coll writes, was an exception in dedicating much of his money to Islamic political causes. But even his personal wealth, Coll says, fell far short of paying for the terrorist network he later founded. For that, he had to raise funds among true believers within the wider Islamic world.

Though never estranged from his family, Osama grew up in a separate household in Jeddah, with a stepfather whom Mohamed chose. From time to time, he journeyed to Syria for visits with his mother's kin. Coll's interviews with family members and classmates paint him as an unusually timid boy, but otherwise quite average. After Mohamed's death, he was enrolled in a good private school -- English in academics, Saudi in religious orientation. In his teens, he supplemented his studies with religious instruction and gravitated to membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that was then spreading through Arab society, promoting fundamentalist values. At 17, he married a 14-year-old cousin, who quickly bore him a son; he kept her in strict Islamic seclusion. Though increasingly religious, he had done well at school in commerce and technology, and after graduation he joined his half-brothers in the family construction firm.

The year 1979, when he was 21, marked a turning point for Osama and for Saudi Arabia. It was the year of the Iranian revolution, which ignited widespread religious militancy. Islamic radicals struck at royal power in a wild attack on the Holy Mosque in Mecca, and, though suppressed in bloody battle, the assault left the state badly shaken. The Sauds solicited help from the United States to preserve their status, and authorized construction of a major American base on Saudi soil. Osama made clear his disapproval of the infidel presence, generating tensions within the bin Laden family, which stood to profit handsomely from the project. The next year, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The bin Ladens rallied to make major contributions to the Afghan resistance, preponderantly Islamic, and sent Osama to Pakistan to oversee the distribution of funds. His work, being anti-communist, pasted over the family rift and delayed his own break with the Sauds and their American allies.

By the mid-'80s, bin Laden moved beyond money matters to supplying arms to the Afghan irregulars, the mujaheddin, then to recruiting and training Arab militants to fight alongside them. Arms were now cheap. The United States was flooding the market, chiefly with Stingers, the anti-aircraft missiles that assured the Russians' defeat. Coll found no record of CIA meetings with bin Laden. The agency knew who he was but showed no special interest in him or awareness of the danger his militancy represented.

Osama founded al-Qaeda soon after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988. He then returned to Saudi Arabia, leaving behind his followers to support the fundamentalist Taliban in the post-war struggle among Afghan factions. But he never reconciled with the Sauds, and he broke with them openly when they invited U.S. troops onto their soil for the looming war against Iraq. His offer to send al-Qaeda to fight Iraq if the invitation was revoked brought only laughter. The confrontation created a dilemma for the bin Laden family: Much as it loved the profits of building for the Americans, it had no stomach for fraternal schism. Finally, the king put his foot down, and the family cut off the wayward brother from his company stipends. Osama, with three wives (a fourth had recently left him), 11 sons and an unrecorded number of daughters, chose exile in Sudan, then was informed he could not stay. In 1996, he flew back to a warm reception among his sympathizers in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan, where he presumably remains to this day.

Coll dwells only in passing on the violence later attributed to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. He charts Osama's rising anger at the Sauds and at America. He leaves no doubt that Osama's organizational and fund-raising talents remained sharp; he even credits Osama's engineering with making the caves of Tora Bora, where he took refuge, impregnable to U.S. forces. As for bin Laden's kin, Coll suggests that, though most retain warm feelings for him, after 9/11 necessity forced them to distance themselves from his actions. Taken together, they seem more bewildered than angered by the course he has chosen. Responsible for what is now a global company, the brothers have been particularly stringent; the sisters appear to be more sympathetic. Whether any of them secretly sends him money remains uncertain. As for the 9/11 conspiracy, Coll repeats little of what we already know. Instead, he has chosen to write about a man and his family, enriching our understanding of the powerful impact they have made on our times.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
“A fascinating panorama . . . about a man and his family [and] the powerful impact they have made on our times.”
—The Washington Post

“Riveting . . . the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Stunningly researched and grippingly told . . . [The Bin Ladens] ought to be read by anyone who really wants to understand the origins of the current crisis.”
—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times

Customer Reviews

"The swimmer in the sea does not fear rain"
Steve Coll, who attributes the above statement to Osama Bin Laden, has given us a well-researched history of the extended Bin Laden family and especially of the early years of Osama himself. The story is a compelling one told with verve and with copious and humanizing detail (65 pages of endnotes and bibliography). For obvious reasons, he was unable to penetrate the black hole of Bin Laden's fugitive years following the invasion of Afghanistan and his purported escape from Tora Bora. That history is yet to be written and will provide the necessary coda to Coll's accounting. We see snatches of the narrative to come in recent news items: one of his sons and his English wife refused asylum in Spain, another released from house arrest in Iran and reportedly now in Pakistan. Osama himself, according to Steve Coll, has sworn "not to die but a free man". For seven years, he has managed to elude the most technologically advanced search-and-destroy machine ever created, unseen (to the touch but not unheard) in the eye of the maelstrom. This is a book that cries out for a part two, which may not now be long in coming.

Book by Bin Laden's Mistresss Is Better
THE BIN LADENS
STEVE COLL

I give this book 4 stars but I have to say that the book
by Osama Bin laden's mistress Kola Boof was much more insightful,
better written and frankly much more exciting to read.

People have attacked her and "some" tried to claim her story
wasn't true, but I dare anybody to read her book and then claim
that she's just making up stories. She NAMED NAMES all through
her book and it's full of information including about the U.S.
Government that only someone telling the truth would have access
to. Her autobiography "Diary of a Lost Girl" is not only one of
the best memoirs I've ever read. It's also the best book I've
read so far on my new KINDLE e-reader.

You want to read a great book that's worth the money, get "Diary
of a Lost Girl" by Kola Boof and then see a side of Bin laden that
nobody's talking about.

Amazing.
This is a must read for humans. Guess what? The bin Laden clan is not so different from any other family--they've got personalities that span the spectrum. Osama's father had 54 children and died in a plane crash. Daddy was an ambitious, clever, can-do sort of man. A charismatic opportunist, and a capitalist. He built a company up from nothing and, by Islamic law, his fortune and business were passed on to his children. Osama got his share. He was an only child from a Syrian wife. He was a quiet lad and found his way educated by religious extremists ... and he took to it--fundamentalist religion. The rest of the fam took to the good life that money could buy--oil money mostly-- passed on from the King of Saudi Arabia for construction projects. The family disowned Osama and now they are making money hand over foot. I think Osama will go down in history as somewhat of a hero, a sort of Robin Hood, Butch Cassidy type. Bush? History won't be kind to him - he's the one with the anti-social personality. The bin Ladens don't exhibit great intellect, they're really quite unexceptional, except for Osama, who had the rare courage of convictions ... religious fanaticism.
It's been seven years now - bin Laden's still a free man, Bush is being retired to his ranch - there are two wars still going on, and the stock market is back to "ground zero." Amazing.