A sprawling, fascinating account of America's declared No. 1 enemy, his far-flung family and the astonishing number of influential Americans who live within that family's orbit. Salem Bin Laden loved American pop music and films. For many years he kept a kind of "rolling intercontinental party" that would be interrupted only when he called up one of his fleet of jets and ran off to do business, whether meeting with Brooke Shields in Hollywood or the king of Saudi Arabia at home or in some foreign venue. So writes New Yorker staff writer and two-time Pulitzer winner Coll (Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, 2004, etc.), who finds Salem involved in countless other ventures around the world, from telecommunications to construction to arms-dealing (at least enough of the last to get tangled up in the Iran-Contra Affair). In addition, Salem's siblings owned real estate across America, from apartment complexes to an airport; funded presidential races, favoring the GOP; and enjoyed friendships with British royalty and the American elite. "In both a literal and a cultural sense," Coll observes, "the Bin Laden family owned an impressive share of the America upon which Osama declared war." Even so, the relationship was shaded and complex. The über-patriarch of the family was a Yemeni who worked doggedly to build a fortune in Saudi Arabia. He then branched into Palestine, only to be displaced by the victorious Israeli government at the time of the 1967 war, which surely contributed to then-ten-year-old Osama's later views. Mohamed Bin Laden returned from East Jerusalem to find himself in a strained relationship with the Saudi royal family, perhaps because he was glacially slow to deliver on huge public-works contracts. This, too, may have led to his offspring's views, and it cannot have helped that Salem died in a plane crash in America, just as Mohamed died in a plane crash caused by an American pilot. "Bush's ill-considered use of the word 'Crusade' to describe America's response to September 11" couldn't have helped either. The makings of a villain, shaped in many ways by the culture he came to revile. Urgent and important reading. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The children of Muhammad bin Laden, from the desert to the jet set to the cave. IS Osama bin Laden a rebel against the Saudi Arabian ruling class or a model member of it? That question lurks behind "The Bin Ladens," by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer Steve Coll. The world's most famous terrorist owes his fortune and his standing to a family business that Coll calls "the kingdom's Halliburton." Like Halliburton, the Saudi Binladin Group specializes in gigantic infrastructure projects. Government connections are the key to the family's wealth. So you would assume they would react with unmixed horror to a radical son, like the duchess in the Noël Coward song: You could have pierced her with swords When she discovered Her youngest liked Lenin And sold the Daily Worker near the House of Lords. But Saudi Arabia, Coll shows, is a place where the interests of rulers and revolutionaries are less easy to distinguish. Muhammad bin Laden, Osama's father, emigrated from the canyons of the Hadhramawt, in present-day Yemen, in the 1920s. He arrived in Jidda, one-eyed and semiliterate, at a time when Saudi Arabia had hardly any paved roads and the king kept his treasury in a tin trunk. Muhammad was charismatic. His Workers, with whom he prayed and sang at job sites, revered him. He was scrupulously honest, as Arabian lore holds Hadhramis to be, and his company keeps this reputation still. Most important, Muhammad would serve the greedy and capricious Saudi princes in ways that Bechtel and other foreign contractors balked at - doing humiliating jobs from digging gardens to fixing air conditioners. The grateful royals made him their main palace- and highway-builder in the boom years after the war. By the time Muhammad died in a plane crash in September 1967, his company was worth an estimated $150 million, and he had fathered 54 children by about 22 wives. Those children, Osama included, grew up in the shadow of a court society. Royal favor was all. Since the Saud family sent its sons to Princeton and Georgetown, Muhammad educated many of his own sons in the West, too, starting with Salem, his impious and ribald successor. Coll's account of Salem is doting. When the austere King Faisal was assassinated in 1975, the sybaritic King Fahd took power. Hedonism and consumerism became for Salem what piety had been for his father: common ground with the royal family. Knowledgeable about private planes, luxury cars and new gadgetry, Salem became, as Coll puts it, a "royal concierge." Salem was purposeful. Those royals he shopped for were the same ones who decided on lucrative construction contracts. Salem assigned each of his brothers a prince to cultivate, while he worked on accumulating powerful cronies in the United States. A wheeler-dealer, Jim Bath, who had served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush, was his route into the upper reaches of Texas politics - the Bushes, the Bentsens and particularly James Baker, later secretary of state, whom the bin Ladens' lawyer called the family's "favorite politician." Since Salem's own death in a plane crash in 1988, the family's present patriarch, Bakr, has nurtured his American ties, both as an investor in the powerful Carlyle Group and as a donor to Jimmy Carter's causes. The bin Ladens, Coll writes, came to own "an impressive share of the America upon which Osama declared war." Osama was timid. Coll suggests that he was haunted by the low status of his Syrian mother. An afternoon Islamic study group he joined during junior high school filled him with purpose, and eventually with anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and an abhorrence of photography. These stances got little attention. They were just a more ardent version of what Saudi kids were taught anyway. Politicized piety did not make Osama a black sheep. It made him an asset. In the mid-1980s, Fahd granted the bin Ladens a contract to redevelop - critics would say Americanize - the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. These projects replaced highway-building as the mainstay of the family income. They depended on the good graces of Saudi clerics and powerful princes like Prince Nayef, who later claimed the 9/11 attacks were a Zionist plot. Osama's commitment to Muslim holy war impressed such people more than Salem's bathroom humor. Far from hating the Saud family, Osama would fly into a fury if he heard someone question Fahd's legitimacy. Even in 1990, Coll writes, he saw himself as "an international Islamic guerrilla leader who worked in service of his king." Coll shows that Osama's efforts supporting the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan could never have been done on his own nickel. He inherited just 2.27 percent of his father's fortune. What he had, though, was a court network - conservative princes, the company's associates and the charitable funds of various elite families, including his own. He also had equipment. The bin Laden group was the largest owner of Caterpillar earthmovers in the world. Osama used them to fortify the caves that would shelter Arab and Afghan mujahedeen and, after 9/11, himself. Salem arranged shipments of anti-aircraft missiles. Khalid, a brother who worked in the company's Cairo office, obtained Afghan visas for Egyptian radicals. The jihad was a family affair. The question is whether it remained a family affair after Osama turned his sights on the United States. Coll did not crack the family's inner circle, so his conclusions on the matter are provisional. But through government papers and interviews with various bin Laden associates, he gives us a judicious, painstaking and vivid picture of an exotic family pulled in two directions by world events. Occasionally, the picture is too vivid - there is more detail than most readers will need about Khaled bin Laden's stud farm in Egypt, Khalil bin Laden's Brazilian wife's sister's drug addiction and Yeslam bin Laden's unsuccessful stock transactions. Osama's siblings repudiated his acts as early as 1994, but they left a door open to reconciliation. After 9/11, they seemed more interested in retaining legal counsel than in sharing information. Coll found allegations in a California custody case that there were scenes of celebration at the bin Laden compound in Saudi Arabia after the attacks. Coll does not believe any of the bin Ladens permitted to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after 9/11 had connections to radical Islam. He notes, though, that one who had possible connections - Omar Awadh - may not have been interrogated by the F.B.I. Sept. 11 changed the family in two big ways: it made one of the sons into the hero of the Arab world, and it drove up the price of oil, igniting a construction boom. With oil topping $100 a barrel, the bin Laden group is thriving. It has 35,000 employees and expects to double in size in the coming decade. It is building airports in Egypt and elsewhere. In Mecca and Medina, it oversees vast real estate projects. "To please American audiences, the bin Ladens would have to seek forgiveness and denounce Osama," Coll writes. "To please audiences in the Arab world, where the family's financial interests predominantly lay, such a posture would be seen as craven." Seven years' distance reveals a brutal reality. For both his family and his country Osama bin Laden's attacks turned a profit. Christopher Caldwell's book on immigration, Islam and Europe will be published next spring.

The sprawling and immensely wealthy Bin Laden family has a past and present far more complex and interesting than that of one middle-aged man holed up in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a staff writer for the New Yorker, has written an impressive family saga that spans three generations and four continents and intersects with some of the key events of the last century. Osama is, of course, part of this story, but he isn't necessarily the most interesting or even the most important family member. Coll begins with an examination of the life and career of the family patriarch, Mohamed, who was born in poverty in southern Yemen, where he toiled in menial jobs. As a teenager, he immigrated to the port city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. His cleverness and ambition meshed perfectly with the building boom fueled by the oil revenues of the Saudi royal family. Before his death in 1967, Mohamed had fathered more than 50 children by various wives, and Coll offers portraits of some of them. He effectively shows how the creation of the Bin Laden family fortune was, and continues to be, tightly bound to the fate of the Saudi royal family. This is a well-done, sweeping chronicle of a clan that continues to exert worldwide power and influence.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2008 Booklist

This remarkably well-written account of the bin Laden family and its involvement with Saudi Arabia and the Middle East is a timely contribution to understanding one of the world's most significant areas. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Coll takes on the complex story of the enormous bin Laden family, beginning with Mohamed bin Laden, born circa 1905 in present-day Yemen. During his youth in the 1930s, Mohamed moved to Jeddah and beyond to eastern Saudi Arabia, where he made his home. From the 1940s to 1967, he married a large number of women and fathered 54 children. He and his family built a "unique and important partnership" with Saudi Arabia's royal family, engaging in an array of business enterprises including construction and road building. Extremely competent, they became immensely wealthy. Their investments and land purchases in their adopted homeland, Europe, and in other countries, especially the US from Florida to Beverly Hills, drew international attention. Mohamed bin Laden's son Osama, born in 1958, became painfully anti-American and anti-semitic after some years in Afghanistan and after the first New York World Trade Center attack in 1993. Hated in Saudi Arabia, he was stripped of his citizenship in 1994. A brilliantly researched, frightening, thoroughly accurate, marvelously informative work. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. J. W. Walt Simpson College (IA)

How the Bin Laden family star rose, finally imploding with Osama. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved