The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright Paperback

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history detailing the rise of Al-Qaeda and the intelligence failures leading to 9/11, tracing figures like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from radical beginnings in the 1940s to orchestrating the attacks, focusing on their motivations, the creation of their terror network, and the crucial missed opportunities by the FBI and CIA to stop them.