Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll's book presents the story of the Bin Laden family and its role in shaping the personality and way of thinking of the infamous and world known Osama bin Laden.

“An Arabian Family in the American Century” portrays a family torn between Islam and the West and entered the collection of books on Islamism, which includes Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" and Mary Habeck's "Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror."

The book portrays Osama as one of the 54 children of Mohamed Bin Laden, who had many wives and was not involved in politics. He was a bricklayer for an American oil company in the 1930s and later in life he began his own business in the domain of constructions.

Reading the book, one cannot fail to notice the strange connection between airplanes and the bin Laden family. Apparently, Osama’s father died in an airplane accident while Osama was a kid. Salem, Osama’s oldest brother, also died while piloting his own plane in 1988, and several daughters and sons of Mohamed took flying lessons.

Even though Coll focused on the Bin Ladens as a family, and not especially on Osama, the reader can find out a lot about the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks on the September 11, 2001.

The Bin Ladens are portrayed as a quite poor family who develop their construction business, becoming the official construction company of the Saudi royal family. So the book could be considered to actually reveal the story of two families, Bin Laden and Al-Saud.

The depiction of patriarch Abdulaziz Ibn Saud in the book reveals the fact that Jihadism is not always fueled by a passion to obtain justice for Palestinians. It seems anti-Semitism can be a good fuel as well, as Abdulaziz was a very passionate anti-Semite, although he had never encountered a Jew in his whole life.