The Looming Tower, a Hulu miniseries about American inter-agency fighting in the run-up to 9/11, has finished airing. It dramatizes how the hoarding of information by the CIA hampered counterterrorism efforts generally, and specifically, how Muslim Lebanese-American FBI agent Ali Soufan endeavoured to prevent fundamentalists from hijacking his peaceful religion. The character portraying the latter storyline is as professional as those who feature in the former are amateurish, something reviewers omit to mention, arguably because the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on which the small screen adaptation is based served as an executive producer. Yet this should not detract readers from Lawrence Wright’s magnum opus. Indeed, with a second season in the offing, now is an opportune time to read his 432-page 2011 edition. I say this because the majority of the journalist’s tome covers a half-century timespan of Islamist militancy, reportedly the focus of producers, who in the first series concentrate on the fallout from the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. Wright’s sophisticated, deep-dive account renders readers instantly conversant in recent Egyptian and Saudi Arabian history, context viewers who hitherto believe al-Qaeda was created in a vacuum will undoubtedly appreciate. Though little of the material comprising portraits of plotters (Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri) and hunters (John O’Neill and Martin Scheuer) is novel, the exhaustive research undergirding them is. The vividness of Wright’s travelogue-like storytelling, aided and abetted in the conducting of 500-plus interviews over five years, ensures well-trodden ground was never so readable. And for those new to the subject, they will learn about the writings of Muslim Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb and how a shorter, one-time Gandhi-quoting OBL – financial mis-manager-in-chief – received no aid by the U.S. during his unheroic Soviet-Afghan war. A co-writer of the eerily prescient film The Siege, it is not surprising that The Looming Tower reads like a thriller. Wright’s page-turning, heart-stopping, even-handed narrative is not without its flaws, however, and his cursory references to presidential decision-making means those desiring a critique are directed to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon’s The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against America.