Review
From the book jacket: On November 4, 1979, a group of
radical Islamist students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Inspired by the
revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, they hoped to stage a three-day
sit-in protest of the American decision to allow exiled Iranian leader Shah
Mohammed Reza to enter the United States for medical treatment. But these
modest, peaceful aims were supplanted by something much more severe and
dangerous. The students took sixty-six Americans hostage and kept the majority
of them for 444 days in a prolonged conflict that riveted the world.
The Iran hostage crisis was a watershed moment in American history. It was
America's first showdown with Islamist fundamentalism, a confrontation that has
remained at the forefront of American policy to this day. In Iran, following the
ousting of the Shah, a provisional...
Beyond the Book
Mark Bowden worked as a reporter at
The
Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years before
becoming a national correspondent for
The Atlantic.
He published his first book,
Doctor Dealer, in
1987, but it was not until 1999 and the publication of
Black Hawk Down (a National Book Award Finalist)
that he achieved significant fame as a writer.
Guests
of the Ayatollah has become something of a family
affair - while he was busy writing the book, his cousins
David and Arcadia Keane made a
four-hour companion documentary, with a script
written by Bowden's son Aaron, that was first aired in
mid-2006.
For his next book he plans to write a...
