UKC

Can anyone suggest a book about Osama Bin Laden. I am looking for something Academic or Semi Academic (is that a thing?) that is hopefully referenced and written in a balanced style, but readable. Not looking for something by Tom Clancy or some nit wit apologist, but it would be good to understand how the wider islamic diaspora view him.

"Five Books" is generally my go-to resource for things like this.

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/best-books-osama-bin-laden-peter-bergen/

TL;DR:

• The Osama bin Laden I know by Peter Bergen
• The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll
• Growing up bin Laden by Najwa bin Laden, Omar bin Laden and Jean Sasson
• The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
• Osama bin Laden by Michael Scheuer
• Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam by Jason Burke

He crops up in some of Robert Fisk's writing but perhaps not what you are after

The Looming Tower

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Looming-Tower-Al-Qaedas-Road/dp/0141029358

I only vaguely remember reading it...

...but it gets good reviews.

That Five Books site looks really good to dip into to spot a random topic and think, "maybe I'll get an interesting book on whatever".

That’s six....

I’ve read two of these (Burke and Wright) and they are both good. Karen Armstrong also writes well on fundamentalism and is worth a read. 

Hah!

I knew someone would point that out... The first one is by the interviewee, the others are his recommendations.

I have a copy of The Looming Tower that you can have for the price of postage

Thats very kind of you, what a nice gesture, thank you, however it is available at my local library. Thank you again.

Thats a great idea, thank you.

Very good and, being written by a New Yorker journalist, an easy read.

Scheuer has his own very specific and now really rather odd views, just worth keeping in mind, but because of his job could perhaps claim to have learnt more about Bin Laden than most others in the west.

I've got this somewhere as well, it's a good journalistic account. Burke I remember as taking a fair minded approach at a time when this was all very politicised.

If you have Amazon Prime you can watch the TV version of the Looming Tower they made a few years ago - it was pretty good.

SteveX - are you interested in the biography of bin Laden alone? Or the context that produced him, if the latter then some of the work by Gilles Kepel or Olivier Roy on the history of political Islam is good. All their major works have been translated into English I believe. I remember Kepel's "Jihad: the trail of political Islam" helped me really get my head around things when my work suddenly plunged me into that world. Roy's Globalised Islam also was very rewarding when I read it a few years later.

Yes, the context that produced him. Thank you for those suggestions.