Journalist Jonathan Randal draws on his deep knowledge of the Middle East to create a portrait of Osama bin Laden that is also an excellent backgrounder on the larger topic of Islamist terrorism. Randal does a strong job of tracing the hardening of bin Laden's antagonism to the West and explaining how that has shaped the man whom he describes as "a cross between the president of the Jihad Incorporated money machine and the head of a maverick Ford Foundation dispensing seed-money grants of a very special nature."
