Mark Bowden

Already a classic of war reporting and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden's brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour. Instead, they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. The following morning, eighteen Americans were dead and more than seventy had been badly wounded.Drawing on interviews from both sides, army records, audiotapes, and videos (some of the material is still classified), Bowden's minute-by-minute narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern combat ever written—a riveting story that captures the heroism, courage, and brutality of battle.

"Bowden has a way of making modern nonfiction read like the best of novels . . . [Killing Pablo] is absolutely riveting."--Denver Post A tour de force of investigative journalism, Killing Pablo is the story of the vio-lent rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, the head of the Colombian Medellin cocaine cartel. Escobar's criminal empire held a nation of thirty million hostage in a reign of terror that would end only with his death. In an intense, up-close account, award-winning journalist Mark Bowden exposes details never before revealed about the U.S.-led covert sixteen-month manhunt. With unprecedented access to important players--including Colombian president Cesar Gaviria and the incorruptible head of the special police unit that pursued Escobar, Colonel Hugo Martinez--as well as top-secret documents and transcripts of Escobar's intercepted phone conversations, Bowden has produced a gripping narrative that is a stark portrayal of rough justice in the real world.

In the early hours of January 31, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched over one hundred attacks across South Vietnam in what would become known as the Tet Offensive. The lynchpin of Tet was the capture of Hue, Vietnam?s intellectual and cultural capital, by 10,000 National Liberation Front troops who descended from hidden camps and surged across the city of 140,000. Within hours the entire city was in their hands save for two small military outposts. American commanders refused to believe the size and scope of the Front?s presence, ordering small companies of marines against thousands of entrenched enemy troops. After several futile and deadly days, Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham would finally come up with a strategy to retake the city, block by block and building by building, in some of the most intense urban combat since World War II.With unprecedented access to war archives in the U.S. and Vietnam and interviews with participants from both sides, Bowden narrates each stage of this crucial battle through multiple viewpoints. Played out over 24 days and ultimately costing 10,000 lives, the Battle of Hue was by far the bloodiest of the entire war. When it ended, the American debate was never again about winning, only about how to leave. Hue 1968 is a gripping and moving account of this pivotal moment.

From the best-selling author of Black Hawk Down comes a riveting, definitive chronicle of the Iran hostage crisis, America's first battle with militant Islam. On November 4, 1979, a group of radical Islamist students, inspired by the revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They took fifty-two Americans hostage, and kept nearly all of them hostage for 444 days.In Guests of the Ayatollah, Mark Bowden tells this sweeping story through the eyes of the hostages, the soldiers in a new special forces unit sent to free them, their radical, naïve captors, and the diplomats working to end the crisis. Bowden takes us inside the hostages' cells and inside the Oval Office for meetings with President Carter and his exhausted team. We travel to international capitals where shadowy figures held clandestine negotiations, and to the deserts of Iran, where a courageous, desperate attempt to rescue the hostages exploded into tragic failure. Bowden dedicated five years to this research, including numerous trips to Iran and countless interviews with those involved on both sides.Guests of the Ayatollah is a detailed, brilliantly re-created, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.

On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, ages ten and twelve, vanished from a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C. As shock spread, then grief, a massive police effort found nothing. The investigation was shelved, and the mystery endured. Then, in 2013, a cold case squad detective found something he and a generation of detectives had missed. It pointed them toward a man named Lloyd Welch, then serving time for child molestation in Delaware. The acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down and Hue 1968 had been a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper at the time of the original disappearance, and covered the frantic first weeks of the story. In The Last Stone, he returns to write its ending. Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch’s sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, five skilled detectives learned to sift truth from determined lies. How do you get a compulsive liar with every reason in the world to lie to tell the truth? The Last Stone recounts a masterpiece of criminal interrogation, and delivers a chilling and unprecedented look inside a disturbing criminal mind.

From Mark Bowden, the preeminent chronicler of our military and special forces, comes The Finish , a gripping account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. With access to key sources, Bowden takes us inside the rooms where decisions were made and on the ground where the action unfolded.After masterminding the attacks of September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden managed to vanish. Over the next ten years, as Bowden shows, America found that its war with al Qaeda—a scattered group of individuals who were almost impossible to track—demanded an innovative approach. Step by step, Bowden describes the development of a new tactical strategy to fight this war—the fusion of intel from various agencies and on-the-ground special ops. After thousands of special forces missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the right weapon to go after bin Laden had finally evolved. By Spring 2011, intelligence pointed to a compound in Abbottabad; it was estimated that there was a 50/50 chance that Osama was there. Bowden shows how three strategies were mooted: a drone strike, a precision bombing, or an assault by Navy SEALs. In the end, the President had to make the final decision. It was time for the finish.

From the author of Black Hawk Down comes the story of the battle between those determined to exploit the internet and those committed to protect it—the ongoing war taking place literally beneath our fingertips.The Conficker worm infected its first computer in November 2008 and within a month had infiltrated 1.5 million computers in 195 countries. Banks, telecommunications companies, and critical government networks (including the British Parliament and the French and German military) were infected. No one had ever seen anything like it. By January 2009 the worm lay hidden in at least eight million computers and the botnet of linked computers that it had created was big enough that an attack might crash the world. This is the gripping tale of the group of hackers, researches, millionaire Internet entrepreneurs, and computer security experts who united to defend the Internet from the Conficker the story of the first digital world 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. Award-winning journalist Mark Bowden tells the saga of Lavin's rise and fall with the gripping, novelistic narrative style that won him international acclaim as the author of the New York Times best-seller Black Hawk Down. "Immensely readable . . . eye-popping . . . a smoothly crafted, exciting, can't-put-it-down book." -- Louisville New Voice

From Mark Bowden, a "master of narrative journalism" (New York Times), comes a true-crime collection both deeply chilling and impossible to put down.Six captivating true-crime stories, spanning Mark Bowden's long and illustrious career, cover a variety of crimes complicated by extraordinary circumstances. Winner of a lifetime achievement award from International Thriller Writers, Bowden revisits in The Case of the Vanishing Blonde some of his most riveting stories and examines the effects of modern technology on the journalistic process.From a story of a campus rape at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 that unleashed a moral debate over the nature of consent when drinking and drugs are involved to three cold cases featuring the inimitable Long Island private detective Ken Brennan and a startling investigation that reveals a murderer within the LAPD's ranks, shielded for twenty six years by officers keen to protect one of their own, these stories are the work of a masterful narrative journalist at work. Gripping true crime from a writer the Washington Post calls "an old pro."

Told in riveting, novelistic detail by the author of the best-seller Black Hawk Down, Finders Keepers is the widely acclaimed true story of an incredible week in the life of Joey Coyle, a down-and-out longshoreman from working-class South Philadelphia. One afternoon, just blocks from his home, Coyle found two curious yellow containers containing $1.2 million in unmarked money from a casino. They had just fallen off the back of an armored truck. Even before news of the missing money exploded across the headlines, Detective Pat Laurenzi was working around the clock to track it down. Joey Coyle, meanwhile, was off on a bungling misadventure, sharing his windfall with everyone from his girlfriend to total strangers to the two neighborhood kids who were with him when he found it. Loaded with intrigue and suspense, Finders Keepers is the remarkable tale of an ordinary man faced with an extraordinary moral dilemma, and the fascinating reactions of the family, friends, and neighbors to whom he turns.

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes readers inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight gang members in prison. Sandtown is one of the deadliest neighborhoods in the world; it earned Baltimore its nickname Bodymore, Murderland, and was made notorious by David Simon’s classic HBO series “The Wire.” Drug deals dominate street corners, and ruthless, casual violence abounds.Montana Barronette grew up in the center of it all. He was the leader of the gang “Trained to Go,” or TTG, and when he was finally arrested and sentenced to life in prison, he had been nicknamed “Baltimore’s Number One Trigger Puller.” Under Tana’s reign, TTG dominated Sandtown. After a string of murders are linked to TTG, each with dozens of witnesses too intimidated to testify, three detectives set out to put Tana in prison for life. For them, this was never about drugs: It was about serial murder.Now an acclaimed journalist who spent his youth in the white suburbs of Baltimore, Mark Bowden returns to the city with exclusive access to the FBI files and unprecedented insight into one of the city’s deadliest gangs and its notorious leader. As he traces the rise and fall of TTG, Bowden uses wiretapped drug buys, police interviews, undercover videos, text messages, social media posts, trial transcripts, and his own ongoing conversations with Tana’s family and community to create the most in-depth account of an inner-city gang ever written. With his signature precision and propulsive narrative, MarkBowden positions Tana – as a boy, a gang leader, a killer, and now a prisoner- in the context of Baltimore and America, illuminating his path for what it really was: a life sentence.

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for the NFL Championship game. Played in front of sixty-four thousand fans and millions of television viewers around the country, the game would be remembered as the greatest in football history. On the field and roaming the sidelines were seventeen future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti, and Giants greats Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and assistant coaches Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry. An estimated forty-five million viewers—at that time the largest crowd to have ever watched a football game—tuned in to see what would become the first sudden-death contest in NFL history. It was a battle of the league's best offense—the Colts—versus its best defense—the Giants. And it was a contest between the blue-collar Baltimore team versus the glamour boys of the Giants squad. The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the history of American sport. Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the championship, it is destined to be a sports classic.

In the sixty-four days between November 3 and January 6, President Donald Trump and his allies fought to reverse the outcome of the vote. Focusing on six states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin— Trump’s supporters claimed widespread voter fraud.It was not a well-orchestrated matter. There was no guiding genius pulling the strings in key states for the defeated Donald Trump. In the weeks after the election, in counties and precincts all over the country, many local Republican officials and even Trump’s own campaign workers washed their hands of his increasingly unhinged allegations of fraud. But there was no shortage of people willing to take up the fight. Urged on by Trump and his coterie of advocates, lawyers, and media propagandists, true believers turned on their colleagues, friends, and neighbors — even those in their own party — to accuse them of rigging the election.The real story of the insurrection began months before Trump’s mob attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. That riot was the desperate final act, emblematic of the clumsy, failed movement Trump had been building for years. It began in cities and small towns all over America on election day, November 3, 2020.Working with a team of researchers and reporters, Bowden and Teague uncover never-before-told accounts from the election officials fighting to do their jobs amid outlandish claims and threats to themselves, their colleagues, and their families. The Steal is an engaging, in-depth report on what happened during those crucial nine weeks and a portrait of the heroic individuals who did their duty and stood firm against the unprecedented, sustained attack on our election system to ensure that every legal vote was counted and the will of the people prevailed.

Anyone who has read Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down or Killing Pablo knows that he is capable of putting us in the heat of a story in a way few writers can. Road Work gathers the best of his award-winning writing, from his breakout stories for the Philadelphia Inquirer to his influential pieces in the Atlantic on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whether traveling to Zambia, where a team of antipoachers fights to save the black rhino, to Guantánamo Bay to expose the controversial ways America is fighting its war on terror, or to a small town in Rhode Island to penetrate the largest cocaine ring in history, Bowden takes us down rough roads previously off limits—and gives us another gripping read.

Bringing the Heat is the story of one team's season-long campaign for the NFL championship, told through the personal stories of the men on the field and the coaches, managers, and owner on the sidelines. The team is the 1992 Philadelphia Eagles, a group of players assembled in the iconoclastic image of their former head coach Buddy Ryan. They are known throughout the league for their ferocious defense and for the otherworldly talents of their quarterback Randall Cunningham.Award-winning journalist Mark Bowden gets deep inside the world of professional football in a way no writer has ever done before, with an insightful and hilarious portrait of one of the most exciting teams ever to play the game. He spares none of the game's ugliness - the greed, the racism, and the often sadistic violence - while capturing the beauty of athleticism at its highest level, the courage of men who face each play knowing that one bad hit can end a career, and above all the exultant glory of victory that inspires their struggle to be the best.

New York Times bestselling author Mark Bowden has had a prolific career as one of America’s leading journalists and nonfiction writers. His new collection, The Three Battles of Wanat and Other True Stories , features the best of his long-form pieces on war, as well as notable profiles, sports reporting, and essays on culture.Including pieces from the Atlantic , Vanity Fair , the New Yorker , and the Philadelphia Inquirer , this collection is Bowden at his best. The titular article, “The Three Battles of Wanat,” tells the story of one of the bloodiest days in the War in Afghanistan and the extraordinary years-long fallout it generated within the United States military. In “The Killing Machines,” Bowden examines the strategic, legal, and moral issues surrounding armed drones. And in a brilliant piece on Kim Jong-un, “The Bright Sun of Juche,” he recalibrates our understanding of the world’s youngest and most baffling dictator. Also included are profiles of newspaper scion Arthur Sulzberger; renowned defense attorney and anti-death-penalty activist Judy Clarke; and David Simon, the creator of “The Wire.”Absorbing and provocative, The Three Battles of Wanat is an essential collection for fans of Mark Bowden’s writing, and for anyone who enjoys first-rate narrative nonfiction.

He is still pudgy. His brown belt bites gently into soft flesh under a white polo shirt and white pants. His square pink face is widening bottomward like a baobab, slackening from chin to sternum, easing into Churchillian jowls. Blond eyebrows spray up on the famous low brow, over small pale-blue eyes. The famous world-by-a-string smirking playboy face has gained gravitas. Last June, the Donald turned 50. Wunderkind no more.In The Art of the Donald , Mark Bowden takes us inside the Donald Trump’s private quarters (and private jet), painting an intimate portrait of the mogul at mid-life, a picture that includes lots of bacon, marble, and a morbid fixation with falling planes.The Art of the Donald was originally published in Playboy , May 1997.Cover design by Adil Dara.

D-Day is one of the significant turning points in wartime history and was the largest single military operation ever launched. In Our Finest Day, best-selling author Mark Bowden reveals the human faces behind this brutal battle, using reproductions of original documents. Included in these pages are personal letters and poignant journal entries from soldiers, secret dispatches and pages from code books, and strategic battle plans and maps. These removable artifacts-from the collection of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans-allow readers to hold a piece of history in their hands. Imagine holding a replica of the last letter written home by a soldier as he waited nervously for the attack to begin, or the message sent to Allied headquarters in England informing them that the beaches had been taken. From the commanders of Operation Overlord to the airborne troopers and resistance fighters, Our Finest Day introduces readers to the brave men who risked their lives and triumphed over Hitlers Germany.

The Unique System of Nonverbal Skills Used by the Most Effective Leaders in Business Today CONTROL THE CONVERSATION, COMMAND ATTENTION, ANDCONVEY THE RIGHT MESSAGE--WITHOUT SAYING A WORD Whether you're presenting an idea, delivering a speech, managing a team, or negotiating a deal, your body language plays a key role in your overall success.This ingenious step-by-step guide, written by an elite trainer of Fortune 50 CEOs and G8 world leaders, unlocks the secrets of nonverbal communication--using a proven system of universal techniques that can give you the ultimate professional advantage. Learn easily how to: Successfully master the visual TruthPlanearound you to win trust now. Gesture in a way that gains everyone’s attention—even before you speak. Appeal to others' deep psychological needsfor immediate rapport and influence. This enhanced eBook includes 13 exclusive videos demonstrating different body language techniques to enhance communication, increase trust, and attract others. You'll discover how to sit, stand, and subtly alter your body language to move with confidence, control conversations, command attention, persuade andinfluence others, and convey positive energy—without saying a word.It's the one key to success nobody talks about!

What sets the very best footballers apart from the rest? It’s not about ability but about being able to perform at your peak level consistently. You train your ability regularly, but do you leave your form down to ‘luck’ and simply hope you have a good game? Thanks to developments in our understanding of how the brain works, you can now effectively train to improve your form by conditioning your thoughts and behaviour in all aspects of your life. This engages the parts of the brain that enable you to perform consistently on the football pitch.Using Mark’s proven BECOME method, you can stop relying on luck, and easily and your confidence and self-beliefSharpen your motivation and driveMake better decisions, more quicklyPerform consistently throughout the seasonBring tackling, passing, shooting and every part of your game to a whole new levelIt’s time to get the edge. It’s time to Use Your Brain and Raise Your Game.

This book is first and foremost a strategy guide, but it is also filled with fun stories and interesting examples along with some offbeat PCT traditions. You will learn how much thru-hiking the PCT today differs from ten years ago and how those differences demand new hiking strategies. For example, today’s PCT thru-hiking strategies need to take into account not only the Sierra snowpack but also the timing of wildfire season. The increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather as the result of the growing effects of climate change demand a well thought out and sound thru-hiking strategy. Anything less means that factors outside your control could stop your hike cold. Beyond strategy, you will benefit from advice on nearly every aspect of hiking the PCT. Understand how to plan for a non-continuous Southern Sierra hike under new terms established for the 2020 PCT Long Distance permit. Find the best online resources. Learn the importance of gear selection and resupply strategy in minimizing weight. Find advice on water carry and hydration. Learn about hiking the Sierra in the snow, including specific advice for each of the early creek crossings and for each of the 7 major Sierra passes. Understand “motivators” that PCT thru-hikers use to take care of the “mental” self as well as your “physical” self. I’ll give you many of my personal backpacking “tricks” and “lessons learned”. After reading this book, you will be equipped with the information and understanding needed to make the best practical and strategic decisions for completing today’s PCT thru-hike.

Short story

Stonehenge is arguably the greatest prehistoric monument in western Europe; as a World Heritage Site it ranks in significance with such sites as the Acropolis of Athens, the Pyramids of Giza, Great Zimbabwe and Machu Picchu. Stonehenge sits at the heart of a landscape rich in other monuments and remains of the Neolithic period and Bronze Age that are also part of the World Heritage Site. Recent research by English Heritage’s landscape archaeologists within the Stonehenge World Heritage Site has led to the identification of previously unknown sites and, perhaps even more importantly, the re-interpretation of known sites, including Stonehenge itself. This work has been carried out alongside recent and on-going independent research initiatives conducted by a number of academic institutions, involving international co-operation. This book presents the most significant findings of the English Heritage research and shows how it integrates with the results of work undertaken by colleagues in other research bodies. It traces human influence on the landscape from prehistoric times to the very recent past and presents an up-to-date synthesis of the results of recent fieldwork. It will be of value to anyone interested in Stonehenge itself, in megalithic monuments, in the Neolithic period and Bronze Age of Europe and in the historic evolution of chalkland landscapes.

ハイテク装備のブラックホーク・ヘリ2機の墜落は、タスク・フォースの兵士たちに大きな動揺をもたらした。救援のための車輌部隊も混乱をきたし、増え続ける負傷者の後送は困難をきわめる。刻々と事態は悪化し、水や食料、弾薬の不足に苦しむ彼らは絶対数で勝る敵に追いつめられてゆく…一昼夜におよぶ緊迫した局地戦の全貌を抜群の構成力と映像的な筆致で描破し、全米大ベストセラーとなった話題作。（下巻）

リドリー・スコット監督映画化。1993年10月３日、ソマリアの首都に米軍特殊部隊が空挺降下。この秘密作戦は一時間程で終了するはずだった。だがハイテク装備のブラックホーク・ヘリが撃墜されたことで戦況は一変してしまう……多数の視点から戦場ドラマを再現した傑作戦争ノンフィクション！（上巻）

A flamboyant polymath, General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (1827–1900) was influential in four fields during his military training, anthropology, archaeology and public education. Yet very little is known about his career, character, or motivation. Mark Bowden has written an entertaining and thoroughly researched biography of the General, which describes his stormy relationships with his wife, children, colleagues, tenants and dependants; his military career; his activities in public education; and his contributions to anthropology and archaeology. In particular he assesses his impact as excavator, field archaeologist, theoretician and first Inspector of Ancient Monuments on the development of British archaeology. This is the most complete biography of a controversial man whose methods and ideals have been much quoted but frequently misunderstood and misrepresented.

The Malvern Hills are a dramatic ridge of ancient volcanic rocks along the western edge of the Severn Valley. Archaeologically, the Hills are known almost exclusively for the two very large and prominent Iron Age hillforts that crown the British Camp and Midsummer Hill. In 1999 the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (now part of English Heritag), with a number of partners, embarked on an investigative project designed to study the hillforts and other well-known sites, but also to focus attention on the Hills more widely as a landscape of special archaeological interest. The project involved documentary research, aerial survey and fieldwork. The most significant results are presented here. These results will continue to inform management and conservation initiatives on an around the Hills, as well as future research programmes. The Malverns have formed a boundary at least since the Bronze Age. This is not just a social or political phenomenon. Both in prehistory and in the medieval period, the Malverns were in effect a ritual landscape against which various religious rites were played out. The paramount importance of the numerous springs of pure water that issue from the monuments that have traditionally drawn archaeologists, but by considering the landscape as a whole it is possible to draw legitimate inferences about the way in which the Hills might have been viewed and used by dwellers in the surrounding country.

This is the first published overview of the archaeology of urban common land. By recognising that urban common land represents a valid historical entity, this book contributes towards successful informed conservation. It contains a variety of interesting and illuminating illustrations, including contemporary and archive photographs. Historically, towns in England were provided with common lands for grazing the draft animals of townspeople engaged in trade and for the pasturing of farm animals in an economy where the rural and the urban were inextricably mixed. The commons yielded wood, minerals, fruits and wild animals to the town's inhabitants and also developed as places of recreation and entertainment, as extensions of domestic and industrial space, and as an arena for military, religious and political activities. However, town commons have been largely disregarded by historians and archaeologists; the few remaining urban commons are under threat and are not adequately protected, despite recognition of their wildlife and recreational value. In 2002, English Heritage embarked upon a project to study town commons in England, to match its existing initiatives in other aspects of the urban scene. The aim was to investigate, through a representative sample, the archaeological content and Historic Environment value of urban commons in England and to prompt appropriate conservation strategies for them. The resulting book is the first overview of the archaeology of town commons - a rich resource because of the relatively benign traditional land-use of commons, which preserves the physical evidence of past activities, including prehistoric and Roman remains as well as traces of common use itself. The recognition of town commons as a valid historical entity and a valued part of the modern urban environment is an important first step towards successful informed conservation. An important consideration for the future is maintaining the character of town commons as a different sort of urban open space, distinct from parks and public gardens.