Mike Shea on the month’s new releases

Lawrence Wright

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Knopf

(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com

THE LOOMING TOWER: AL-QAEDA AND THE ROAD TO 9/11 might be the bracing splash of ice water that alerts the Great Satan America to how little it knows about the radical Islamic culture that spawned its bête noire, Osama bin Laden (the seventeenth of 25 sons and one of 54 “official” children of Mohammed bin Laden) and his global terrorist network, Qaeda al-Jihad. Austinite LAWRENCE WRIGHT culls from declassified materials, videotapes, writings, and interviews to provide context for bin Laden’s avowed goal—to destroy the United States and est­ablish worldwide rule by Islamic law—and his success in baiting the U.S. into possibly unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wright, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has covered the Middle East for years, and his authoritative analysis is as unsettling as it is fascinating—doubly so when accompanied by the loud sucking sound of American resources being drained to shadowbox bin Laden and his acolytes across the map.

Ben Fountain

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

Ecco

One might suspect that gremlins erased all the peaceful democracies from BEN FOUNTAIN’s office globe, so fascinated is the Dallasite with the world’s trouble spots in BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH CHE GUEVARA, a collection of eight finely crafted short stories. Touching only quickly on the revolutions and coups of his settings (Myanmar, Haiti, Sierra Leone, and others), Fountain instead conjures intimate looks at those coping in the aftermath. There is ornithologist John Blair, held for ransom by Colombian-rebels-turned-petty-bureaucrats, whose discovery of a rare-parrot colony complicates the rebels’ schemes (“Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera”). And fisherman Syto Charles, whose frustration with corrupt officials in Haiti leads him to steal three duffel bags of coke from a smugglers’ beach drop and play Caribbean Robin Hood (“Bouki and the Cocaine”). Irony abounds in Fountain’s mini-theaters of the absurd, where Kafka would feel right at home.

Jeff Abbott

Fear

Dutton

JEFF ABBOTT’s star has been slowly but steadily on the rise. A string of paperback-only mysteries earned the Austin writer a bump up to the hardcover big leagues. His second hardback, FEAR, is a pharmaco-thriller about a clandestine medical clinic (cue diabolical laughter) experimenting with Frost, a drug that smoothes out memories that trigger post-traumatic stress disorder; it has the potential to change lives and make fortunes. When vital research information goes predictably missing, the chase is on, with PTSD patients, government agents, and pharmaceutical types all shooting and clubbing one another to get the miracle drug. Abbott has a genuine knack for the bang-up finish, and Fear crackles and pops to a noisily satisfying conclusion. But his plot points are murky (why exactly was the Frost research conducted in secret?), and the story line is a jumble. Megasellerdom has been oft predicted for Abbott, but Fear is not the rocket to launch him into that orbit.

Allen Wier

Allen Wier

What about this era appealed to your novelist instincts? During the war, so many men left Texas to fight in the East that the Comanches moved the western frontier eastward by one hundred to two hundred miles. In June of 1875 Quanah Parker and his tribe were the last Comanches to give up and go onto the reservation. That period, between the Civil War and Quanah’s surrender in Texas, was appealing because it seemed that the stakes were high and some conclusion was imminent.

Did you stumble across any surprising findings in your research? A lot of what I learned surprised me, probably because so much of the Texas history I knew came from family stories or, worse, Hollywood. I’d envisioned a wise old Comanche chief with a long feather headdress; then I read that Comanches did not revere old age and did not have permanent chiefs. They did not wear feather headdresses until the late nineteenth century.

Did Tehano say everything you’d hoped? As long as Tehano is [736 pages], the first draft was twice as long. Even now, I feel as if things are not finished. But I like that notion, that signals still rise from that time and place.

Tehano: Allen Wier, published by Southern Methodist University Press.