Review of reviews:?Books

Book of the week

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century

by Steve Coll

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

(Penguin, $35)

Osama bin Laden founded al Qaida two months after his oldest brother, Salem, was killed while flying an ultralight in Texas. Salem bin Laden had lived in a world of luxury. As head of the Saudi Arabia­–based construction empire their late father had built, Salem enjoyed collecting guitars, cars, and women. To win a bet, he once proposed marriage to four Western girlfriends at once, losing the wager because only three accepted. Despite their lifestyle differences, Mohamed bin Laden’s first- and 17th-born sons remained surprisingly close, says author Steve Coll. Two years before Salem’s 1988 death, the playboy and the prayer leader paired up in London to negotiate an arms deal for Osama’s Afghan fighters. Had Salem lived to wield his influence over his younger brother, Coll says, Osama’s religious radicalism might not have bent itself toward mass terrorism.

Coll’s new history of the bin Laden family offers “the most psychologically detailed portrait” of Osama yet published, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. From the moment it introduces us to Osama’s father, as he begins seeking his fortune in the Saudi city of Jeddah, the book gives readers a “novelistic” sense of how oil wealth transformed the Middle East and eventually ignited Osama’s rage. Competence apparently wasn’t Mohamed bin Laden’s calling card, said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. He won the patronage of the Saudi royal family through “sycophancy and simple bribery,” and the family firm wound up botching the renovations of some of Islam’s holiest sites. It’s possible Osama came to see even his own family as corrupted by the West.

Coll’s “marvelous” book illuminates a “fundamental, perhaps unavoidable, misunderstanding” at the heart of the family saga, said Amir Taheri in the New York Post. Though Salem and many of Osama’s 50-odd other

siblings embraced American business opportunities, they generally shared Osama’s misperception that the U.S. was nothing but a hedonist’s bazaar, “a giant version of Ali Baba’s cave.” Salem liked America, in other words, but for “the wrong reasons.” Osama, of course, tried to destroy America, “also for the wrong reasons.”

Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World’s Lowliest Languages

by Derek Bickerton

(Hill & Wang, $26)

A funny thing happens when speakers of a pidgin language have children, says linguist Derek Bickerton. The kids make the pidgin into something new. Pidgin tongues typically arise when groups of people need to communicate but share no formal language. Slaves, refugees, and immigrants develop pidgins, for example: Their invented speech borrows words from pre-existing languages, but it exhibits no structure or rules of its own. What children do is add rules, creating a creole that the parents themselves can’t understand. To find out how they do it, Bickerton developed a unique research method. “My favorite modus operandi,” he writes, was to locate a community where people speak oddly, then “drive around until I saw a bar I liked the look of.”

Bickerton loves playing the rogue, said Nathaniel Rich in the Los Angeles Times. His new memoir is “part intellectual detective story, part linguistics primer.” When he’s not bounding into a pub, he’s bouncing down a jungle road in a pickup or wading ashore on some remote island. His bar trick actually serves a purpose beyond distancing him from his armchair-bound peers and rivals. “Drunks are the world’s most underrated language-teaching resource,” he writes. Whatever their language, they speak unusually slowly and carefully, because they’re hoping no one notices how intoxicated they are.

Readers will be “reasonably happy” in the company of this veteran iconoclast until he fully reveals his book’s “ulterior motive,” said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Bickerton has long believed that a “universal grammar” exists in the minds of all children; this common template would explain why the structure of creole languages is similar all around the world. But as Bickerton’s effort to sell this thesis grows ever more technical, “all but the strongest readers are likely to tire.” Bickerton never lets on that other scholars, including some of his former students, “have delivered some heavy blows” to his favorite theory, said Michael Erard in The New York Times. Those critics are “unlikely to write memoirs,” though. “Especially ones as diverting as Bastard Tongues.”