Osama: The Making of a Terrorist is not so much another biography of old beardie as a worldly and suave example of a once thriving subclass of literature, the newspaper correspondent’s memoir.
Born in Buffalo, New York on ‘the day President Roosevelt closed the banks’ in 1933, Jonathan Randal reported for 40 years on the wars of the post-colonial era, beginning with the struggle for independence in Algeria in the 1950s and ending with Bosnia in the 1990s. For most of that time, he was correspondent for the Washington Post.
His earlier books, which are both recommended, were about distinctive peoples living outside the mainstream of Muslim life: the Maronite Christians of Lebanon (The Tragedy of Lebanon, 1983) and the Kurds in the mountains of Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria (After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?, 1997). Osama was the project of Randal’s retirement in Paris.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.