MICHIKO KAKUTANI BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Steve Coll’s riveting new book, “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics.
“The Bin Ladens” uses the prism of one family to examine the mind-boggling, culture-rocking effects that sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia. It also sheds light on the “troubled, compulsive, greed-inflected, secret-burdened” relationship that developed between that desert nation and the United States, and the conflicts many Saudis felt, pulled between the traditional pieties of their ancestors and the glittering temptations of the West.
By focusing on Mr. bin Laden’s conflicted relationship with his family and that family’s complicated relationship with the West, Mr. Coll has added fascinating new details to our understanding of how Mr. bin Laden evolved from a loyal family adjutant into an angry outcast, intent on lashing out at the very people - the Saudi royal family and the United States of America - that his father and brothers had cultivated in their business dealings for years.
Mr. Coll’s book also traces a host of bizarre connections among its cast of characters, suggesting that there is often little separation when it comes to the new globalized world of international finance.
We learn, for instance, that Muhammad bin Laden, Osama’s father, began his rise by working as a bricklayer and mason for Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company. That organization had been formed to manage the oil rights of the Standard Oil Company of California, and the huge international company that the bin Ladens built would come to do business with well-known American firms like General Electric.
In doing so, they drew on advice from the law firm Baker Botts, headed by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and Bush family adviser.
But at odds with the Saudi royal family, Osama bin Laden left the kingdom in 1991 for the Sudan, where he bought a farm and raised horses and sunflowers while training jihadis .
“Osama seemed to believe during this period,” Mr. Coll writes, “that he could have it all in Sudan - wives, children, business, horticulture, horse breeding, leisure, pious devotion and jihad - all of it buoyed by the deference and public reputation due a proper sheikh.”
By 1995, Mr. Coll writes, there was “a hint of King Lear in the wilderness” to his exile: he was out of money, one of his wives had divorced him, and his eldest son had left him to return to Saudi Arabia.
Isolation fueled Mr. bin Laden’s selfrighteousness, and his wrath increasingly focused on the United States, particularly after Washington put pressure on the government of Sudan to expel him from Khartoum, leading to his exile in 1996 to the harsh lands of Afghanistan.