Killing Pablo is the inside story of the brutal rise and violent fall of Colombian cocaine cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. Also from Bowden: the best selling Black Hawk Down.
By January 1968, despite an influx of half a million American troops, the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which "the end begins to come into view". The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke.
From Mark Bowden, internationally best-selling and acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down and the preeminent chronicler of the actions of our military and special forces writing today, comes an intensely gripping account of the hunt for and elimination of Osama bin Laden. With unprecedented access to key sources and his great gift for storytelling, Bowden takes us inside the rooms where decisions were made and on the ground where the action unfolded.
This is a book rife with revelations, from the secret communications between the Obama administration and the Iranian government to dispatches from the front lines of the new field of financial warfare. For listeners of Steve Coll's Ghost Wars and Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, The Iran Wars exposes the hidden history of a conflict most Americans don't even realize is being fought but whose outcome could have far-reaching geopolitical implications.
Resuming the narrative of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, best-selling author Steve Coll tells for the first time the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11.
Ninety-nine elite American soldiers are trapped in the middle of a hostile city. As night falls, they are surrounded by thousands of enemy gunmen. Their wounded are bleeding to death. Their ammunition and supplies are dwindling. This is the story of how they got there - and how they fought their way out. Black Hawk Down drops you into a crowded marketplace in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia with the U.S. Special Forces and puts you in the middle of the most intense firelight American soldiers have fought since the Vietnam war.
Killing Pablo is the inside story of the brutal rise and violent fall of Colombian cocaine cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. Also from Bowden: the best selling Black Hawk Down.
By January 1968, despite an influx of half a million American troops, the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which "the end begins to come into view". The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke.
From Mark Bowden, internationally best-selling and acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down and the preeminent chronicler of the actions of our military and special forces writing today, comes an intensely gripping account of the hunt for and elimination of Osama bin Laden. With unprecedented access to key sources and his great gift for storytelling, Bowden takes us inside the rooms where decisions were made and on the ground where the action unfolded.
This is a book rife with revelations, from the secret communications between the Obama administration and the Iranian government to dispatches from the front lines of the new field of financial warfare. For listeners of Steve Coll's Ghost Wars and Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, The Iran Wars exposes the hidden history of a conflict most Americans don't even realize is being fought but whose outcome could have far-reaching geopolitical implications.
Resuming the narrative of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, best-selling author Steve Coll tells for the first time the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11.
Ninety-nine elite American soldiers are trapped in the middle of a hostile city. As night falls, they are surrounded by thousands of enemy gunmen. Their wounded are bleeding to death. Their ammunition and supplies are dwindling. This is the story of how they got there - and how they fought their way out. Black Hawk Down drops you into a crowded marketplace in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia with the U.S. Special Forces and puts you in the middle of the most intense firelight American soldiers have fought since the Vietnam war.
Doctor Dealer is the story of Larry Lavin, a bright, charismatic young man who rose from his working-class upbringing to win a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, earn Ivy League college and dental degrees, and buy his family a house in one of Philadelphia's most exclusive suburbs. But behind the facade of his success was a dark secret - at every step of the way he was building the foundation for a cocaine empire that would grow to generate over $60 million in annual sales.
The news-breaking inside account of Israel's state-sponsored assassination programs, from the man hailed by David Remnick as "arguably [Israel's] best investigative reporter."
A young woman leaves a party with a wealthy US senator. The next morning her body is discovered in his car at the bottom of a pond. This is the damning true story of the death of campaign strategist Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick and of the senator - a 37-year-old Senator Ted Kennedy - who left her trapped underwater while he returned to his hotel, slept, and made phone calls to associates. Leo Damore's 1988 national best seller, originally entitled Senatorial Privilege, almost didn't make it into print after its original publisher, Random House, judged it too explosive....
With the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. This collection draws on several articles he wrote while researching that book as well as many that he's written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread.
Worm: The First Digital World War tells the story of the Conficker worm, a potentially devastating piece of malware that has baffled experts and infected more than twelve million computers worldwide. When Conficker was unleashed in November 2008, cybersecurity experts did not know what to make of it. Exploiting security flaws in Microsoft Windows, it grew at an astonishingly rapid rate, infecting millions of computers around the world within weeks.
The explosive first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan. With the publication of Ghost Wars, Steve Coll became not only a Pulitzer Prize winner, but also the expert on the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of Bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998.
A top-secret US Army Special Operations unit has been running covert missions all over the world, from leading death squads to the hideout of drug baron Pablo Escobar to capturing Saddam Hussein and, in one of the greatest special operations missions of all time, helping to track down al-Qa'eda leader Osama bin Laden. "The Activity," as it became known to insiders, has achieved near-mythical status, even among the world's Special Operations elite.
In this remarkably human portrait of one of the 20th century's most complicated personalities, author Andrew Scott Cooper traces Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's life from childhood through his ascension to the throne in 1941. He highlights the turbulence of the postwar era, during which the shah survived assassination attempts and coup plots to build a modern, pro-Western state and launch Iran onto the world stage as one of the world's top five powers.
In Mossad, authors MichaelBar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal take us behind the closed curtain with riveting, eye-opening, boots-on-the-ground accounts of the most dangerous, most crucial missions in the agency's 60-year history.
Russia expert Luke Harding lays out the most in-depth look to date at the Trump campaign's dealings with Russia. Beginning with a meeting with Christopher Steele, the man behind the shattering dossier that first brought the allegations to light, Harding probes the histories of key Russian and American players with striking clarity and insight. Harding exposes the disquieting details of the Trump-Russia story - a saga so huge it involves international espionage, offshore banks, sketchy real estate deals, mobsters, money laundering, disappeared dissidents, and more.
The Exile joins Osama bin Laden as he escapes into Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, bringing to vivid life the years leading up to his death spent on the run and in exile. It tells the human story, and illuminates the global political workings. It is a tale of evasion, collusion, betrayal and the deep pain of isolation.
The fighting that raged in the East during the First World War was every bit as fierce as that on the Western Front, but the titanic clashes between three towering empires - Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Germany - remains a comparatively unknown facet of the Great War. With the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the war in 2014, Collision of Empires is a timely expose of the bitter fighting on this forgotten front - a clash that would ultimately change the face of Europe forever.
The Iran hostage crisis was a watershed moment in American history. It was America's first showdown with Islamic fundamentalism, a confrontation at the forefront of American policy to this day. It was also a powerful dramatic story that captivated the American people, launched yellow-ribbon campaigns, made celebrities of the hostage's families, and crippled the reelection campaign of President Jimmy Carter.
Mark Bowden tells this sweeping story through the eyes of the hostages, their radical, naive captors, the soldiers sent on the impossible mission to free them, and the diplomats working to end the crisis. Taking listeners from the Oval Office to the hostages' cells, Guests of the Ayatollah is a remarkably detailed, brilliantly re-created, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.
"Bowden keeps tension high." (Booklist)
Any additional comments?
I'm a fan of Bowden and liked Black Hawk Down. He bring a reporters eye for detail to this subject and offers a minute by minute account of the crisis. There's not much new here but it is an exciting listen and doesn't pull any punches.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
Overall, this was a fascinating listen. The author narrated his own book, and did a good job. The story line is easy to follow and well written.
My reservations about this book are as follows: Bowden is a strong fan of Jimmy Carter and that comes through often throughout the book. If you are also a Carter fan, you will enjoy that. His descriptions of Carter and his handling of thie hostage situation are far and away more favorable than I've seen anywhere else, other than in Carter's own writings. These probably served as an important source in the writing of Bowden's book.
The final chapter, which summarizes and editorializes, was the weak link. It consisted in a fair amount of great praise for Carter and absolute disdain for Reagan. When Bowden mentioned Reagan, you could even hear a disgusted change in his voice. He also got in a jab at George W. Bush, by stating that he had kept the former hostages from suing Iran for damages. I'm not a big Bush fan, but am rather tired of EVERYTHING being "his fault". The former hostages have, since their captivity, lived through the administrations of Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton before reaching the "W" years. There was no mention of their legal pursuits during any of these administrations. That made the "W" jab seem like a pure piece of vindictive political correctness, and was annoying. Enough is enough on that score.
Overall, the book was a good listen, but I would not rely on it as a single source for political background of the day. "Siege of Mecca" is an excellent book from Audible which is about the takeover of Mecca's Grand Mosque by Muslim extremists in the late 70's. It is written by Yaroslav Trofimov, who deals briefly with the Carter administration and its handling of foreign policy, including the Iran hostage situation. I heartily recommend it as a companion to this book, or as a stand-alone work. It is excellent in every respect.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful
I recently went on an Iran kick, listening to "All the Shah's Men" (from Audible) and then this book. 'Guests of the Ayatollah' was the far more engaging of the two. I usually shun abridged versions, but I must say that at 9+ hours, this edition was just as engaging and satisfying as many of the great full-length books I have listened to.
The author paints a well-researched view of the whole Iran Hostage Crisis, skillfully blending the parallel stories of the Iranian revolution, the American hostages, President Carter, and the (fascinating!) botched rescue attempt by Delta Force.
This was one of those real-life books that has you engaged as if it were fiction. Highly recommended, especially if you were like me, having always heard of the Iran Hostage Crisis but never knowing the actual details.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
This book is fascinating- about an episode that would be a minor historical event except that our troubles with Iran are still on-going (and Iran keeps taking hostages). The author reads the book himself and at times the story reads like a thrilling spy novel in an exotic place (even though many readers will know generally what happened)... But be forewarned, any story about the mistreatment of a group of hostages for more than a year can be sad and depressing. I enjoyed the many insights into each of the hostages' personalities and their unique ways of coping with their captivity, but there were mornings when after listening for an hour during my commute that I was left sad and angry. It takes a good book to affect me this way, and this is a good book about a history we all should know as we veer towards yet another confrontation with the mullahs of Iran
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
A timely book to read in light of current Islamic extremism and the aftermath of the Benghazi debacle. The book offers a blow-by-blow account of the 1979 takeover of the American embassy in Tehran by leftist and pro-Kohmeini students and resulting capture of 66 American hostages who remained under guard for 444 days.
Bowden clarifies President Carter's successes and failures in relation to the hostage crises as well as debunks the GOP falsehood that President Reagan resolved the hostage situation. Carter, despite his bumbling foreign policy diplomacy, should be credited with finally resolving the crisis at the 11th hour (Inauguration Day 1980).
The reader will be surprised to learn that prior to the November 1979 embassy takeover, radical students unsuccessfully attempted a takeover the previous February. The handwriting was on the wall, similar to Benghazi, but our state department failed to act.
A must read for a deeper understanding of the origins of the current Islamic Revolution against Western powers and values.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
I was only 13 when the Embassy was taken over, and I well remember the images of our diplomats being praded in front of the cameras. While I am sure there is alot more of the story out there, I learned alot about the takeover and the runup to it from this book.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
I was very pleased with this book. I was too young to remember the headlines when this happened but had always wanted to learn more, and Bowden's thorough account is very well done. There's so much to this story. It conveys the fear of the hostages, the inexperience of most of the hostage takers, the desperation of the American government to resolve it, and the amusing antics of the hostages as time wore on. I highly recommend this for anyone interested in a thorough account of the Iran hostage crisis.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Boden is a talent to be recognized...(check out Killing Pablo) This story spins like an historic rodent on an exercise wheel at a Halloween Party---- a little bit squeaky with more rhythmic breathing than would be allowed in a PG13 feature. That is to say a little long winded and redundant with a few to many characters---- but it does continually develop-- and if you can appreciate that it is not fiction, but a story of modern history, the tale of real life experiences: it is worth the time it takes to tell it.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Interesting story of which I only remember Walter Kronkite commenting daily on the number of days the hostages were being held in Iran. I thought the attempted rescue was interesting as I didn't know anything about it and I liked that the author took me into the daily lives of the hostages and showed me big things and small that made me turn the page so to speak to find out what happens even though it was well documented. I'd definitely recommend it if you are like me, old enough to remember something happened but young enough not to know the details. The details made a great story.
Interesting, informative account of imprisoned Americans. With the exception of one, they hung tough and survived.