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Also by Mark Bowden:

Hue 1968, June 2017
Hardcover / e-Book
The Finish, October 2012
Hardcover / e-Book
Worm, October 2011
Hardcover / e-Book
Guests of the Ayatollah, April 2006
Hardcover
Black Hawk Down, August 2001
Paperback

Guests of the Ayatollah
Mark Bowden

The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam

Atlantic Monthly Press
April 2006
704 pages
ISBN: 0871139251
Hardcover
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Historical | Non-Fiction

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, na�ve 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.

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