Mark Bowden Books In Order

Doctor Dealer

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

Bringing the Heat

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 sad*istic 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.

Black Hawk Down

The acclaimed New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down is ‘a shocking account of modern warfare…
gripping and horrifying’ San Francisco Chronicle Destined to become a classic of war reporting, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden’s brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3rd, 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 injured. 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.’Black Hawk Down ranks among the best books ever written about infantry combat…
. A descendent of books like The Killer Angels and We Were Soldiers Once…
and Young.’ Bob Shacochis, The New York Observer’If Black Hawk Down were fiction we’d rank it up there with the best war novels: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, or The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien.’ Tom Walker, The Denver Post’Stands in a league with Shelby Foote’s stirring Civil War Diary, Shiloh.’ Jim Haner, The Baltimore Sun’One of the most gripping and authoritative accounts of combat ever written.’ Kirk Spitzer, USA Today’Amazing…
One of the most intense, visceral reading experiences imaginable.’ The Philadelphia Inquirer A New York Times bestseller for 14 weeks Bowden’s Black Hawk Down series, which appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer was awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award for best foreign reporting

Killing Pablo

Killing Pablo is the story of the fifteen month manhunt for Colombian cocaine cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar, whose escape from his lavish, mansionlike jail drove a nation to the brink of chaos. In a gripping, up close account, acclaimed journalist Mark Bowden exposes the never before revealed details of how U.S. military and intelligence operatives covertly led the mission to find and kill the world’s most dangerous outlaw. Drawing on unprecedented access to the soldiers, field agents, and officials involved in the chase, as well as hundreds of pages of top secret documents and transcripts of Escobar’s intercepted phone conversations, Bowden creates a narrative that reads as if it were torn from the pages of a Tom Clancy technothriller. Killing Pablo also tells the story of Escobar’s rise, how he built a criminal organization that would hold an entire nation hostage and the stories of the intrepid men who would ultimately bring him down. There is Steve Jacoby, the leader of Centra Spike, the ultrasecret U.S. special forces team that would use cutting edge surveillance technology to find one man among a nation of 37 million. There is Morris Busby, U.S. ambassador to Colombia, who would convince the Bush administration to approve the deployment of the shadowy Delta Force operators who would be the key to the drug lord’s demise. And there is Escobar’s archenemy, Col. Hugo Martinez, the leader of Colombia’s federal police, who would turn down a $6 million bribe, survive countless attempts on his life, and endure a humiliating exile while waging his battle against the drug lord’s criminal empire. It was Martinez’s son, raised in the shadow of constant threat from Escobar’s followers, who would ultimately track the fugitive to a Medellin rooftop on the fateful day in 1993 when the outlaw would finally meet his end. Action packed and unputdownable, Killing Pablo is a tour de force of narrative journalism and a stark portrayal of rough justice in the real world.

Our Finest Day

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 Hitler’s Germany.

Finders Keepers

Following best selling and award winning books such as Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, Mark Bowden has won widespread acclaim for his ability to report true life events in riveting detail, with a singular eye for human drama. Now Finders Keepers recounts a mystery that captivated the city of Philadelphia when $1 million went missing. Hard times had left Joey Coyle a likable longshoreman from the close knit working class neighborhood of South Philadelphia living with his ailing mother and struggling to support a drug habit. One afternoon, Coyle was on his way to score drugs when, just blocks from his home, he found two curious yellow containers lying in the street. As it turned out, they had just fallen off the back of an armored van, and they contained $1 million in unmarked money from a casino. From the moment the cash disappeared, Detective Pat Laurenzi, with the help of the FBI, worked around the clock to find it. As the story exploded onto the front pages, the entire city was swept up in the hunt. Joey Coyle, meanwhile, shared the money with everyone from his girlfriend to complete strangers to the neighborhood’s most notorious mob boss, who allegedly helped launder it. Coyle would live his next week in a drug fueled whirlwind, planning his future as a rich man even as he grew terrified that he was about to be captured, even killed. Finders Keepers is the remarkable tale of an ordinary man faced with an extraordinary moral dilemma, and the fascinating reactions from complicity to concern to betrayal of the friends and neighbors to whom he turns. Loaded with intrigue and suspense, this is a gripping new book from a versatile and evocative chronicler of American life.

Road Work

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 Guant namo 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.

Guests of the Ayatollah

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.

The Best American Crime Writing 2006

A sterling collection of the year’s most shocking, compelling, and gripping writing about real life crime, the 2006 edition of The Best American Crime Writing offers fascinating vicarious journeys into a world of felons and their felonious acts. This thrilling compendium includes: Jeffrey Toobin’s eye opening expos in The New Yorker about a famous prosecutor who may have put the wrong man on death row Skip Hollandsworth’s amazing but true tale of an old cowboy bank robber who turned out to be a ‘classic good hearted Texas woman’ Jimmy Breslin’s stellar piece about the end of the Mob as we know it

The Best Game Ever

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for that season’s NFL Championship game. Football, growing in popularity amid America s post war economic boom, was still greatly over shadowed by the country s favored pastime baseball but the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football.

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.

Played on a freezing Sunday evening in front of 64,000 fans and an estimated forty five million television viewers around the country at that time the largest crowd to have ever watched a football game the championship would become the first sudden death contest in NFL history. With two minutes left in regulation, Baltimore had possession deep in its own territory, and the ball in the hands of the still unproven quarterback Johnny Unitas.

The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the history of American sports. Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the championship, it is destined to be a sports classic.

Worm

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 worm: the story of the first digital world war.

Wild Stories

For the past decade, Men’s Journal has set the standard for travel and adventure writing by publishing the work of America s finest authors and literary journalists. Wild Stories collects thirty two of the best pieces to appear in the magazine, written by its most esteemed contributors, including Jim Harrison, Sebastian Junger, P. J. O Rourke, Rick Bass, Thomas McGuane, George Plimpton, Hampton Sides, Doug Stanton, Tim Cahill, and Mark Bowden.

Each of the four chapters in Wild Stories showcases Men s Journal s diversity and taut storytelling power. The Adventures is a series of razor sharp travel narratives, from a road trip across India on the perilous Grand Trunk Road to a search for grizzlies in Romania. The Sporting Life is a look into obscure corners of the sports world, where golf s bush league wannabes try to make it to the PGA and a group of cyclists out suffer one another in pursuit of the mythic Hour Record. Men s Lives includes profiles of singular adventurers such as Yvon Chouinard and Ned Gillette, and captures the rewards of such quintessentially male traditions as building a cabin on your own plot of land. And The Reporting collects definitive accounts of the most newsworthy disasters, as well as riveting dispatches from war zones in Somalia, Sudan, and Colombia, and from environmental hot spots in Alaska and Montana.

Commemorating Men s Journal s tenth anniversary, Wild Stories is a diverse and entertaining anthology that explores the magazine s basic creed: Life is an adventure. From the first page to the last, these are stories you ll never forget.