Osama: The Making of a Terrorist" by a former Washington Post correspondent, Jonathan Randal, is less a biography of Al Qaeda's mastermind Osama bin Laden than a history of the contemporary jihadi movement, from its emergence in the mountains of Afghanistan during the 1980's war against the Soviet Union, through the planning of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, to its current metastasis in the wake of the Iraq war. Though much of the material in "Osama" is familiar from earlier books and newspaper and magazine articles, the volume does a nimble and often highly compelling job of leading the...