Twenty top 9/11 books

In 2011 Justin Webb, Pankaj Mishra, and Jason Burke tagged twenty of the best 9/11 books at the Guardian, including:

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

A well-deserved Pulitzer prize winner. It’s a potted history of how the world reached the point where the 9/11 plot could be hatched, the players and their motivations. It’s tautly written and has enough anecdote to lighten the gloomy load. For me, the most illuminating pages deal with the weird psychosexual hang-ups of some of the jihadists, their contempt for women suffused with a genuine fear of being seduced. I spent eight years reporting from the US for the BBC and I never read a more compelling account of the circumstances that brought us to 9/11.-JW

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue