aw. RE: The Nobel Prize for War 2009 goes to ...

[David Morris]

Actually, I'd never heard of The Looming Tower before posting that
link from the Matthew Yglesias Blog (one of my staple political
blogs).  So I really know nothing about Lawrence Wright.  So I Googled
him.  His bio sounds not at all like the Wig-nut you describe:

http://www.lawrencewright.com/bio.html

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff
writer for The New Yorker magazine.

He is a graduate of Tulane University, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and
the American University in Cairo, where he taught English and received
an M.A. in Applied Linguistics in 1969. Upon his return to the U.S. in
1971, Wright began his writing career at the Race Relations Reporter
in Nashville, Tennessee. Two years later, he went to work for Southern
Voices, a publication of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta,
Georgia, and began to freelance for various national magazines. In
1980, Wright returned to Texas to work for Texas Monthly. He also
became a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In December, 1992, he
joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he published a number of
notable articles, which have won him the National Magazine Award for
Reporting as well as the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest
Magazine Journalism, and Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award for
best magazine reporting.

Wright is the co-writer (with Ed Zwick and Menno Meyjes) of The Siege,
starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening, which
appeared in November 1998. He also wrote the script of the Showtime
movie, Noriega: God's Favorite, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and
starring Bob Hoskins, which aired in April 2000.

His history of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to
9/11 (Knopf, 2006) was published to immediate and widespread acclaim,
spending eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and being
translated into twenty-five languages. It was nominated for the
National Book Award and won the Lionel Gelber Award for nonfiction,
the Los Angeles Times Award for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book
Prize, the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for
Excellence in Journalism, and the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction.

In 2006, he premiered his one-man play, "My Trip to al-Qaeda," at The
New Yorker Festival, and then enjoyed a sold-out six-week run at the
Culture Project in Soho. It is now being made into a documentary film,
directed by Alex Gibney, who won the 2008 Academy Award for Feature
Documentary.

Wright has published six previous books. City Children, Country Summer
(Scribner's, 1979), In the New World: Growing Up with America, 1960 -
1984 (Knopf, 1988), Saints & Sinners (Knopf, 1993), Remembering Satan
(Knopf, 1994), Twins: Genes, Environment, and the Mystery of Identity
(Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997; Wiley & Sons, 1998), and God's Favorite
(Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He also serves
as the keyboard player in the Austin-based blues band, Who Do.


On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 2:43 AM, John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com> wrote:
> I remember you mentioned The Looming Tower quite a while back. I looked it up, but isn't Wright a fairly right-wing guy, with a track record of slightly Islamaphobic views? I'm going from memory, but I think he co-wrote the screenplay for a dodgy Bruce Willis movie which contained some pretty unpleasant stereotyping of muslims?