Guests of the Ayatollah by Mark Bowden

Guests of the Ayatollah by Mark Bowden

By the New York Times-bestselling author of Black Hawk Down, the definitive account of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis and 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 captive, 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.

Mark Bowden is the author of twelve novels, the most well-known of which is the #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down. He spent twenty years as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and now contributes to the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and other publications. He lives in Pennsylvania and is a writer in residence at the University of Delaware.