It is a comprehensive collection of personal accounts by people who met Osama bin Laden or worked with him at various stages of his terrorist career.

From the beginning stages of bin Laden’s life in the port city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to the founding of his Al-Qaeda organization in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and further on, bin Laden’s jihad against the United States, culminating in the September 11 attacks in the United States, Bergen’s work takes a personal approach with his research.

At another point, the transcript of an interrogation of Shadi Abdalla by German police reveals how he became bin Laden’s bodyguard, and a part of his inner circle, in 2000.

Former counterterrorism advisor to George W. Bush, Richard A. Clarke, in The Washington Post calls Bergen’s work a “go-to resource” that provides insight into the life of Osama bin Laden with a level of detail that is unprecedented.

[1] Max Rodenbeck of The New York Review of Books, says that Bergen has created a “fascinating sequence of oblique-angled perspectives, casting light on the underlying motives of bin Laden and his companions and revealing some of his less-remarked but significant adventures.”[2] L. Carl Brown at Foreign Affairs Magazine praises Bergen’s ability to create a “coherent and dramatic account” from such a large collection of individual sources.