How We Got So Angry

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef became friends in the late 1990s, when the men were held in nearby cells at the federal supermax prison, outside Florence, Colo. After McVeigh was executed in 2001, Yousef said he’d never known “anyone in my life who has so similar a personality to my own as his.”

The kinship of two terrorists, born into seemingly opposed worlds but drawn toward the same ends, illustrates the theme of Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger: A History of the Present ($27, Farrar Straus Giroux). Mishra, an Indian-born cultural critic, rejects the “Why do they hate us?” framework that divides the world between a retrograde Islam and a progressive West. The real divide, he argues, is between an isolated global elite of all races and faiths and the billions of people who resent it. Globalization imposed from above has failed, Mishra says; the supermax fraternity of McVeigh and Yousef “constituted a kind of globalism from below.”