Lawrence Wright

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in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, The United States
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April 2016


Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and three National Magazine Awards.

His latest book, The Human Scale , is a sweeping, timely thriller, in which a Palestinian-American FBI agent teams up with a hardline Israeli cop to solve the murder of the Israeli police chief in Gaza. According to The New York Times, “Wright succeeds in this complex, deeply felt work.”

He is the author of 11 nonfiction books. His book about the rise of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), was published to immediate and widespread acclaim. It has been translated into 25 languages and won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Ge
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Lawrence Wright My virus, called Kongoli, is actually built on the 1918 Spanish flu. Like Covid-19 (which is a coronavirus, not an influenza), Kongoli is a new diseas…moreMy virus, called Kongoli, is actually built on the 1918 Spanish flu. Like Covid-19 (which is a coronavirus, not an influenza), Kongoli is a new disease, unknown in the human population until it suddenly arises in Asia and spreads across the globe. Kongoli is more fatal than Covid-19 but not as contagious.
As for the timing of the publication, it's a total coincidence that the book appears in the middle of a pandemic, but the eerie parallels with what we see unfolding in front of us are not. This is exactly what public health officials have been warning about for decades.(less)
Lawrence Wright The filmmaker Ridley Scott approached me a decade ago with a question. He had read Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, "The Road." Ridley's ques…moreThe filmmaker Ridley Scott approached me a decade ago with a question. He had read Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, "The Road." Ridley's question was "What happened?" What force could have crushed civilization? I immediately thought of something like the 1918 Spanish flu, appearing now when people live in dense cities and travel across the globe so rapidly. Would we be any better prepared than our ancestors?(less)
Average rating: 4.09 · 129,157 ratings · 14,546 reviews · 83 distinct worksSimilar authors
Going Clear: Scientology, H...

4.04 avg rating — 45,539 ratings — published 2013 — 38 editions
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The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda...

4.36 avg rating — 38,802 ratings — published 2006 — 76 editions
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The End of October

3.76 avg rating — 20,212 ratings — published 2020 — 3 editions
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God Save Texas: A Journey i...

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 7,095 ratings — published 2018 — 3 editions
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Mr. Texas

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 3,639 ratings — published 2023 — 6 editions
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Thirteen Days in September:...

4.19 avg rating — 3,300 ratings — published 2014 — 34 editions
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The Plague Year: America in...

4.12 avg rating — 3,014 ratings — published 2020 — 14 editions
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The Human Scale

4.35 avg rating — 2,347 ratings — published 2025 — 8 editions
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Remembering Satan: A Tragic...

3.63 avg rating — 2,706 ratings — published 1994 — 21 editions
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The Terror Years: From al-Q...

4.02 avg rating — 1,635 ratings — published 2016 — 15 editions
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Quotes by Lawrence Wright  (?)
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“Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music—is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women.”
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower

“Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.”
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“If you paid any attention to the role of disease in human affairs, you’d know the danger we’re in. We got smug after all of the victories over infection in the twentieth century, but nature is not a stable force. It evolves, it changes, and it never becomes complacent. We don’t have the time or resources now to do anything other than fight this disease. Every nation on earth has to be involved whether you think of them as friends or enemies. If we’re going to save civilization, we have to fight together and not against each other.”
Lawrence Wright, The End of October

Polls

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What would you like to read and discuss next? (Please don't vote unless you'll return to discuss!)

Vote for you favorite here, and we will choose the most popular selections for upcoming months. Feel free to make a comment as well to let us know what your second choice would be, as it could help me decide which books to include beyond the winner.

These will be starting in April (taking March off).


We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor
2016, 383 pages, 4.26 stars
$8.99 Kindle, $11+ print, should be at library



"Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.

Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty.

The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad - very mad."
 
  15 votes, 34.9%

The Dead Next Door
2020, 278 pages, 4.28 stars
$5.99 Kindle, $15 print, not at library



"THE WORLD ENDS IN DAYS

First the bombings… cities crumble… infection spreads… Will is alone. His lakeside neighborhood has become a cemetery, the houses now tombstones.

THE DEAD ARE RISING

Out of the shadows, they creep… the streets, the woods, the lake… Will defends his home, his dogs, his sanctuary—but for how long?

THEIR NUMBERS ARE INCREASING

He must choose—complacency or the unknown… making irrevocable decisions that will lead to escape or demise… Will must overcome the odds and break the confines of…

THE DEAD NEXT DOOR"
 
  10 votes, 23.3%

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
2006, 345 pages, 3.94 stars
$8.99 Kindle, $11+ print, should be at library



"A disease of unparalleled destructive force has sprung up almost simultaneously in every corner of the globe, all but destroying the human race. One survivor, strangely immune to the effects of the epidemic, ventures forward to experience a world without man. What he ultimately discovers will prove far more astonishing than anything he'd either dreaded or hoped for."
 
  8 votes, 18.6%

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
2022, 293 pages, 3.82 stars
$11.99 Kindle, print starting at $12.20, should be at library (put on hold now)



"Dr. Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter's research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways.

Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet."
 
  8 votes, 18.6%

The End of October by Lawrence Wright
2006, 345 pages, 3.94 stars
$7.99 Kindle, $9+ print, should be at library



"In this medical thriller Dr. Henry Parsons, an unlikely but appealing hero, races to find the origins and cure of a mysterious new killer virus as it brings the world to its knees.

At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When Henry Parsons--microbiologist, epidemiologist--travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi prince and doctor in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city... A Russian émigré, a woman who has risen to deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security, scrambles to mount a response to what may be an act of biowarfare... already-fraying global relations begin to snap, one by one, in the face of a pandemic... Henry's wife Jill and their children face diminishing odds of survival in Atlanta... and the disease slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions--scientific, religious, governmental--and decimating the population."
 
  2 votes, 4.7%

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