What Sylvia Plath and Al-Qaeda Have in Common

“Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities”

The Pre-9/11 New York City Skyline (Photo Courtesy of the Historic American Engineering Record)

To give myself a break from practically staring at a screen all day, my pre-bedtime routine lately has been lying on the couch, closing my eyes while submerged in a hodgepodge of blankets, and alternating between the audiobooks of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (which he also narrates) and Heather Clark’s Sylvia Plath biography, Red Comet.

The choice to listen to each audiobook was completely random — Red Comet was recommended by my dissertation advisor, and I took a liking to Wright after reading his New Yorker article on Austin, Texas. The subject matter, too, couldn’t be more different, with one concerning the events leading up to 9/11 and the other being a biography of a literary genius. Or so you’d think; because the deeper I got into both stories, the more I saw that they converged into one bigger narrative; the more I got the sense that, on some level, they were telling me the same thing.

In his soothing southern drawl, Wright masterfully paints a sympathetic picture of a movement that has so often been vilified as the epitome of evil without going too far. There is nuance to Al-Qaeda’s terrorism, Wright argues. Yes, it is obviously bad. But…