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A good book, but very dense with names and details. I'm all for providing all that stuff, but I think some editing work could have been done to at least help draw out who are the important names from the less important ones. Sometimes the thread of what he's saying can get lost a bit as he hops from event to event. I imagine this book would have been twice as long that way, but I think each page would also have taken half as much time to read, once this stuff was broken out and structured a bit more.

Criticisms aside, this was a fascinating book. Really good primer on the complex political situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to a lesser extent), and the conditions that allowed Bin Laden to operate. Makes really clear sense of who he was and what he was and was not able to do, what he was and was not actually responsible for. Gives a really good sense of modern islamic terrorism, and the different stages it has gone through, and where we are now. I say, "where we are now", but this was written a decade ago, but the seeds of what he's talking about emerging back then (a brutal, non-political, culltural form of militant Islamism in Europe, indiscriminately targeting civilians rather than political or religious targets) is what we're seeing rip through Europe and the Middle East today.

Would absolutely recommend. Just... do what my mum does when reading regency novels. Maybe just write down names, or refer to the glossary, to remind yourself who everyone is. Or maybe have wikipedia open nearby so you can remind yourself what al-Islami-whatsit is or why the name Farooq Blahdeblah sounds familiar.