Click on the links above to explore the many facets of the World Affairs Council
|
The Rise of al-Qaeda & The Long Road to 9/11
Event Date
Location
Address
- 609 Sutter Street
San Francisco, California 94102
Lawrence Wright, 2007 Pulitzer Prize Recipient for The Looming Tower; Staff Writer, The New Yorker
Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He is a graduate of Tulane University, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the American University in Cairo, where he taught English and received an M.A. in Applied Linguistics in 1969. Upon his return to the US in 1971, Wright began his writing career at the Race Relations Reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Two years later, he went to work for Southern Voices, a publication of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, Georgia, and began to freelance for various national magazines. In 1980, Wright returned to Texas to work for Texas Monthly. He also became a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In December, 1992, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he published a number of notable articles, which have won him the National Magazine Award for Reporting as well as the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, and Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting. Wright is the co-writer (with Ed Zwick and Menno Meyjes) of The Siege, starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening, which appeared in November 1998. He also wrote the script of the Showtime movie, Noriega: God's Favorite, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Bob Hoskins, which aired in April 2000.
His history of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006) was published to immediate and widespread acclaim, spending eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and being translated into more than a dozen foreign languages. It was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Lionel Gelber Award for nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Award for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He also serves as the keyboard player in the Austin-based blues band, Who Do.
 In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright explains the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence breakdowns that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Wright re-creates the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of one of the most successful terrorist groups in modern history. He also follows FBI Counterterrorism Chief John O'Neill as he uncovers the emerging danger from al-Qaeda in the 1990s and struggles to track this new threat. Based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States, his book provides a detailed look at daily life inside of al-Qaeda, the U.S. agents who saw the threat, and the long road to September 11th.
Council and MMA Members: $20, Nonmembers: $30
Online registration is available through the Marines' Memorial Association, for individual tickets please click here or call 415.673.6672, ext. 215
|
