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.
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