In his forthcoming Observer review of The Second Plane, Tom Bissell admires this throwaway Martin Amis line: “I found myself frivolously wondering whether Osama was just the product … of his birth order. Seventeenth out of fifty-seven is a notoriously difficult slot to fill.” Funny, but not entirely accurate—or so I gather from Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens (Penguin Press, $35), an epic history of the vast and vastly rich Saudi Arabian family that spawned W.’s nemesis. Meticulous and compulsively readable, Mr. Coll’s book has a huge cast of characters, swollen by the legion of Osama siblings—the exact number of which is apparently tricky to establish. (One declassified F.B.I. e-mail from 2003 referred to the “millions” of bin Ladens “running around”—and added, reassuringly, that “99.999999% of them are of the non-evil variety.”) Mr. Coll counts 54 children of Mohamed bin Laden, and notes that Mohamed “fathered seven children during the year of Osama’s birth—five sons and two daughters.” His cautious conclusion is that “Osama arrived among the Bin Ladens as somewhere between son number seventeen and son number twenty-one.”  read more »