The Bricklayer’s Sons

I don't know if it's me. Usually Michiko Kakutani's reviews sparkle. Yet I find her review of this new book strange, and not in a way I like.

The Bricklayer’s Sons: The Family That Spawned 9/11 - 'The Bin Ladens' By Steve Coll
Reviewed by MICHIKO KAKUTANI: Steve Coll’s book reveals the crucial role that Osama bin Laden’s relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping him.

It starts off well enough: Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics.

Okay. Mention is made of other books, Steve Coll's Ghost wars : the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004), and Jacob Weisberg's The Bush tragedy. Ms. Kakutani asserts the latter "underscored the role Oedipal rivalries may have played in George W Bush's presidency and his decision to go to war against Iraq," and that Coll's new book "underscores the role that Freudian family dynamics may have played in Mr. bin Laden’s radicalization and his declaration of war against America."

Alright, so far, fine. Oedipal rivalries and Freudian dynamics are useful tools for an author of books and a writer of book reviews. A further useful tool is what is known as "six degrees of separation," which asserts that any one person in the world is no more separated from any other than by six degrees (he knows her, and she knows him, and the like, until the circle is closed).

To wit: We learn, for instance, that Muhammad bin Laden began his rise by working as a bricklayer and mason for Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, which had been formed to manage the oil rights of the Standard Oil Company of California, and that the huge international company that the bin Ladens built would come to do business with well-known American firms like General Electric, and draw on advice from the law firm Baker Botts, headed by James A. Baker III , the former secretary of state and Bush family adviser.

And: We also learn that Jim Bath, a former reserve pilot with the Texas Air National Guard who used to carouse with George W. Bush, later became a business partner in Houston with Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother.

The implications of James Baker doing legal work for bi Laden senior, of his being a long-time Bush confidante and political ally who would serve in George Herbert Walker Bush's administration (and also represent W in Florida when that state's votes were hanging by a dimpled chad back in November of 2000), are left unexplored for this comment, that utterly baffles me.

Salem [bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother] emerges from this volume as a compelling, larger-than-life figure, a picaresque playboy, at once guileless, brilliant and self-indulgent, who held together the increasingly fractious bin Laden clan through sheer force of will and charisma. Salem, who dressed in jeans, loved airplanes and liked to play the harmonica, reportedly “paid a bandleader at an Academy Awards party in Los Angeles hundreds of dollars to let him sing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in seven languages.”

Huh?