Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle In America's War With Militant Islam (2006) By Mark Bowden
Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam is a non-fiction work written by Mark Bowden.
Guests of the Ayatollah relates the events surrounding the Iran hostage crisis of November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981, at the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran. The book explores the causes of the hostage-taking (mostly from the American perspective), commenting on the events which took place in the embassy. The book also describes the aftermath of the hostages' release following the onset of the Iran–Iraq War in September 1980.
The New York Times–bestselling author of Black Hawk Down delivers a “suspenseful and inspiring” account of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 (The Wall Street Journal).
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 recreated, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.
- Soft Cover
- 680 pages
- In Fair to Good Condition
