The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State - Tapa dura

Ten powerful pieces first published in The New Yorker recall the path terror in the Middle East has taken from the rise of al-Qaeda in the 1990s to the recent beheadings of reporters and aid workers by ISIS.

With the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. This collection draws on several articles he wrote while researching that book as well as many that he's written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cult-like beliefs have morphed and spread. They include an indelible impression of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom of silence under the control of the religious police; the Syrian film industry, then compliant at the edges but already exuding a feeling of the barely masked fury that erupted into civil war; the 2006-11 Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, a study in disparate values of human lives. Others continue to look into al-Qaeda as it forms a master plan for its future, experiences a rebellion from within the organization, and spins off a growing web of terror in the world. The American response is covered in profiles of two FBI agents and a chief of the CIA. It ends with the recent devastating piece about the capture and beheading by ISIS of four American journalists and aid workers, and how the US government failed to handle the situation.

Praise for Lawrence Wright
Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David

'Spellbinding . . . A cliffhanger . . . What makes the story a page-turner [is] Wright's seamless, compelling backgrounding of the region's violent history, the enmities and peculiarities of the players who came to the remote presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains to reach a monumental, if flawed, accord that endures to this day' Ellen Warren, Chicago Tribune

'Brilliant, penetrating scholarship . . . Wright expertly captures every move of the three-way realpolitik chess match. By using each man's biography to illuminate the history of his respective nation, he not only chronicles Camp David but elucidates the issues that continue to plague the Middle East' Jeff Labrecque, Entertainment Weekly

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

'An utterly necessary story . . . A feat of reporting. The story of Scientology is the great white whale of investigative journalism about religion' Paul Elie, The Wall Street Journal

'Wright brings a clear-eyed, investigative fearlessness to Scientology-its history, its theology, its hierarchy-and the result is . . . evidence that truth can be stranger than science fiction' Lisa Miller, The Washington Post

'A wild ride of a page-turner . . . Enthralling' Laura Miller, Salon

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

'Riveting . . . Marvellous . . . Not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of events leading up to 9/11 [but also] a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought [it to] us and of their progeny who bedevil us today . . . A thriller. A tragedy, too' Dexter Filkins, The New York Times Book Review

'At once wrenchingly intimate and boldly sweeping in its historical perspective . . . A narrative history that possesses all the immediacy and emotional power of a novel' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times