The Finish, by Mark Bowden

This is a good book, highly recommended, a complex story well-told.

Bowden notes that in many of his final letters, Osama bin Laden has a “quaint courtesy,” and indeed his language does sound oddly cute.  Here’s an excerpt from one written close to his death:

It would be nice if you would pick a number of brothers, not to exceed ten, and send them to their countries individually, without knowing the others, to study aviation… it would be nice if you would ask the brothers in all regions if they have a brother distinguished by good manners, integrity, courage, and secretiveness, who can operate in the United States…

It would be nice.  Maybe it’s the translation.  Osama also doesn’t think too much of Joe Biden, advising in another letter:

The reason for concentrating on [trying to kill Obama, but not other high-level Americans, during a possible visit to Afghanistan] is that he is the head of infidelity and killing him will automatically make Biden take over the presidency for the remainder of the term, as it is the norm over there.  Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the United States into crisis.

Anyway, the book has some excellent information on the lives and careers of figures key to the hunt for Bin Laden.  I learned, for instance, that on 9/11, Bill McRaven, later head of Joint Special Operations Command, was in a hospital bed, having had his pelvis cracked and his back broken during a parachute accident.

Bowden introduces speechwriter and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, noting his”prematurely thinning black hair.”  Later, we learn, “his hair had thinned on top.”

“small as a whorehouse beer”

from the Paris Review interview with James M. Cain:

INTERVIEWER

Were there other signs [that you were going to be a writer]?

CAIN

Well, when I went to Baltimore to work for the gas company, the first of the meaningless jobs I held when I was just out of college, I kept going down to this whorehouse on Saturday nights. I never did go upstairs, though twice I wanted to. One night I met this girl who was awful pretty, and she had pretty legs. I badly wanted to go upstairs with her, but I was afraid because of the disease which I imagined she had. (In Paris during the war I bumped into a girl, and I was horribly lonely, didn’t particularly crave her physically, but she approached me, and asked me to spend the night, and I’m glad I didn’t because I think she would have had my wallet with everything else.) But during this six months I worked for the gas company, I kept going down to that area around Josephine Street. At one of these places you could buy a bottle of beer for fifty cents. “Small as a whorehouse beer” was an expression then. They’d serve them up in glasses so small that thimbles were twice as big. For that fifty cents you were welcome to do anything, downstairs—get along with the girls, stick around—I was just eighteen years old. I listened a lot downstairs. Upstairs was another matter. I was a potential customer, of course. I guess the things you didn’t do . . .

It seems like there’s more to the story, but the interview moves on.  Later Cain claims that Alice In Wonderland is the greatest novel in the English language.

Cain on Chandler’s The Big Sleep:

That book about a bald, old man with two nympho daughters. That’s all right. I kept reading. Then it turned out the old man raises orchids. That’s too good.