Saudi Arabia is a country defined by paradox: It sits atop some of the richest oil deposits in the world and yet its roiling disaffection produced fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. It is a modern state, where wealthy princes and tycoons raise futuristic cities in the desert, and yet its powerful religious establishment would roll back its values fourteen hundred years to the time of the Prophet Mohammed. To fully understand our interdependent twenty-first-century world, we must understand Saudi Arabia.With Inside the Kingdom, author Robert Lacey gives readers a remarkable portrait in full of this most enigmatic of lands. More than twenty years after moving to Saudi Arabia during the oil boom to write his groundbreaking epic The Kingdom, Lacey returned to live once again among the princes and the paupers, the clerics and the progressives. What he found was a society slowly recovering from the past. In this recounting, which takes us from the bloody seizure of Mecca's Grand Mosque in 1979 to the deepening of U.S.-Saudi relations during the Gulf War of 1991 to the fostering of a new generation of Islamic holy warriors led by Osama bin Laden, Lacey shows how Saudi Arabia came to the precipice at which it now stands, struggling to learn how not to be at war with itself. Read Less