Terrrism and the English language: this year's crop of books offers thrills over insight.

• Author: Adams, Lorraine

WE ARE COMPLEX AND SHADOWY IN a growing worldwide network. The Hamburg and Brooklyn cells are closely linked. Our translator drives, curling dagger and pager on his century-old embroidered belt. Clue: Sleepers are friendly but standoffish. Over the sand and through the wind, to bin Shajea's compound we go; kidnappers are near, but our Jeep is strong ... Wait, on this map, Al Gama'at al Islamiyya and Al Muhajirou are in Philadelphia.

Lost? Your location is the world of terrorism non-fiction. We are not in an airport paperback or violent teen video. Authors who wrote these words and scenes wish the books that contain them to be taken seriously. We are reading a Harvard law professor, a Middle East scholar, a CNN analyst educated at Oxford, and a PBS documentarian. These voices come to us from Simon & Schuster, W.W. Norton & Co, and Yale University Press. Scrambling reduces these works unjustly. Yet it is impressions, rather than the revelations their blurbs promise, that stay in mind when reading the terrorism books debuting this fall.

The professor teaching Western Terrorism Literature 1970-2002 might open with the observation that the works of the period have their roots in The Hardy Boys adventure stories--The Sinister Signpost, The Secret Warning, While the Clock Ticked, Mystery of the Desert Giant. A common leitmotif: Only real men are capable of saving an affluent, soft society from foreign predation and apocalypse. The period's overarching theme: Terrorists are bad.

Such a literature might be all we needed before 19 men incinerated 3,000 innocents by flying commercial planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field a year ago. Reading the post-attack books, I thought often of George Orwell's 1945 words on bad writing: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then rail all the more completely because he drinks." Bad writing works the same way, Orwell wrote. It "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts" I have always believed this. But in truth, I had forgotten about it. It took these books during these times to bring this prodigal back to creed.

Not all of the rail terrorism books will be slovenly or foolish. But they will come in great numbers. "Whether publishers are motivated by plucky optimism or cannibal instincts, they are pushing an astonishing number of September 11-related books into the market," Publishers Weekly warned this summer. "Estimates for the fall season range from 65 titles (a number floated at BookExpo America) to 150 (the number calculated by Ingram)--clearly a high-water mark for book tie-ins to a single news event."

In such a crowded field, the author with name recognition has an advantage. As in political campaigns, television is mainlining, newspapers only snorting. Television is expensive. But writers never pay for it as candidates do. Or rather, they pay, but the currency is not cash. It is the degree to which they are willing to leave out what they know. Some might call this intellectual dishonesty. But they're not really lying. Lying is when your mother asks you if you ate the cookies and you say no. This is cookie eating for gifted adults.

Terrorism writers who were on television the most this past year made the bestseller lists this past year. After September 11, Peter L. Bergen, the author of Holy War Inc., has been on the airwaves (and sometimes the radio waves) at least 800 times. Bergen has been a CNN producer in foreign postings for a decade. He went from behind the camera to onscreen as its terrorism analyst after the September 11 attacks. With a British accent and an Oxford history degree, he was calm, reasonable. His book made the New York Times list, and others. Right behind him was Steven Emerson, author of American Fihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, with almost 400 appearances. He, mo, made the bestseller lists. Next came Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz with 340 appearances. Behind, but still making a strong showing, was Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes, with about 150. Dershowitz and Pipes have new books this month. Their television exposure might well make their books bestsellers.

Together, these four men frame the way terrorism is discussed for millions of viewers, and for hundreds of thousands of readers. The prose of Bergen, Emerson, Dershowitz, and Pipes avoids the problems of Orwell's time--jargon, long words, passive tense, pretentious diction. Nor does their prose rationalize the indefensible. As Orwell famously put it, "People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements."

Hiding truth under abstraction was the bad writing of Orwell's day. In our day, Bergen, Emerson, Dershowitz, and Pipes hide truth under entertainment. Their books use hackneyed plotlines, stock characters, and omission of inconvenient facts. They replace the blunt actuality of terrorism with the reassuring thematics of the adventure tale, the spy thriller, the cloak-and-dagger story, even Perry Mason. Their books exhibit the symptoms that Orwell deplored--"staleness of imagery" and "lack of precision"

Omar Sharif Meets CNN

In television-speak, Bergen was "one of a handful of Western journalists to have interviewed the world's most wanted man face to face." Bergen, charmingly free of self-regard, puts it this way: "When you go looking for Osama bin Laden, you don't find him: he finds you," he writes. "It was March 1997 when the phone rang."

We hear bin Laden's booker say, "There ate matters I do not want to discuss on the telephone" We get "games of chicken" among the "mangled hulks of buses" on the Grand Trunk Road We get cocktails at the Pearl Continental Hotel. We get Afghanistan, "the very word is an incantation ... something out of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings" We get "mystery" and "movement back into a time of medieval chivalry and medieval cruelty." After a blindfolded drive, we finally meet the man behind the buildup. Bergen describes him thus:

"He is a tall man, well over six feet, his face dominated by an aquiline nose. Dressed in a turban, white robes, and a green camouflage jacket, he walked with a cane and seemed tired, less a swaggering revolutionary than a Muslim ascetic" Bin Laden "rails" in Arabic, coughs softly, drinks tea, smiles ambiguously. Others in the room listen to his "diatribe" with "rapt attention." That's it. The others could be wearing space suits for all Bergen tells of them. The information culled from bin Laden's soliloquy: Muslims hate Americans. His men were among those who killed U.S. soldiers in Somalia. Bergen supplies context: "This was the first time that bin Laden had told members of the Western press that American civilians might be casualties in his holy war."

Who does this serve? Not the reader, who knows bin Laden has killed 3,000 Americans, wears a white scarf on his head and has a long nose. It's hard to accuse Bergen of self-congratulation, but it's easy to wonder why writing about incantations and diatribes shows anything more than Bergen loves...