Reviews of Guests of the Ayatollah by Mark Bowden

Book Summary

The story of the Iran hostage crisis, America’s first battle with militant Islam.

Five years in the works, 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 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 ouster of the shah, a provisional government was established, and for a critical moment in the modern age’s first Islamist revolution, a more open and democratic society seemed possible. But the religious hardliners on the Revolutionary Council used the hostage crisis as an opportunity to purge moderates from the leadership ranks. They altered the course of the revolution and set Iran on the extreme path it follows to this day.

The Iran hostage crisis was also a dramatic story that captivated the American people. Communities across the country launched yellow ribbon campaigns. ABC began a new late-night television program—which became Nightline—recapping the latest events in the crisis and counting up the days of captivity. The hostages’ families became celebrities, and the never-ending criticism of the government’s response crippled Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign.

Guests of the Ayatollah tells this sweeping story through the eyes of the people who lived it, on both sides of the crisis. Mark Bowden takes us inside the hostages’ cells, detailing the Americans’ terror; confusion, boredom, and ingenuity in the face of absurd interrogations, mock executions and a seemingly endless imprisonment. He recreates the exuberance and naïveté of the Iranian hostage takers. He chronicles the diplomatic efforts to secure the hostages’ release and offers a remarkable view of President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office, where the most powerful man in the world was handcuffed by irrational fanatics halfway around the world. Throughout this all, Bowden weaves the dramatic story of Delta Force, a new Special Forces unit poised for their first mission, Operation Eagle Claw. This was an impossible, courageous, and desperate attempt to snatch the hostages from the embassy in Tehran, which, despite the heroism of Delta Force, exploded into tragic failure in the Iranian desert.

Twenty-six years after the hostage crisis began, Iran, and America’s confrontation with militant Islam, is more relevant than ever before. Guests of the Ayatollah is a remarkably detailed, rigorously researched, brilliantly re-created, suspenseful account of the first battle in this conflict, a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.