“Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has put his boots on the ground in the hard places, conducted the interviews and done the sleuthing… He has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawhiri, Mullah Muhammad Omar and all the rest of them. They come alive… O’Neill and others like him were in a race with Al Qaeda, and although we know how the race ended, it’s astonishing—and heartbreaking—to learn how close it was… The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail… Great stuff.” - Dexter Filkins, Baghdad correspondent