Background
Mark Bowden was born on July 17, 1951, in St. Louis, Missouri. His parents are Richard Houston and Rita Lois (Keane) Bowden. Bowden grew up in Illinois, New York, and Maryland.
Mark Bowden
Bowden is a 1973 graduate of Loyola University Maryland.
Mark Bowden
Mark Bowden
(Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden’s brilliant account of the...)
Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden’s brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3, 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 wounded.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008X5XP9M/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(Killing Pablo is the story of the fifteen-month manhunt f...)
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 techno-thriller. 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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008UX3ITE/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(What would you do if you found a million dollars? When Jo...)
What would you do if you found a million dollars? When Joey Coyle did, he was a twenty-eight-year-old drug-dependent, unemployed longshoreman living with his ailing mother in a tight-knit neighborhood in Philadelphia. While cruising the streets just blocks from his home, fate took a turn worthy of a Hollywood caper when he found $1.2 million in unmarked bills - casino money that had fallen off an armored truck. It was virtually untraceable. Coyle? Not so much. Over the next seven days, fueled by euphoria, methamphetamine, and paranoia, Coyle shared his windfall with everyone from his eight-year-old niece to total strangers to a local mob boss who offered to “clean” it. Even before news of the missing money made headlines, Det. Pat Laurenzi, with the help of the FBI, was working around the clock to find it. No one was prepared for how Coyle’s dream-come-true would come tumbling down, or what would happen when it did.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008RZKB2M/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(On November 4, 1979, a group of radical Islamist students...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008UX8GH8/?tag=2022091-20
2006
(With access to key sources, Mark Bowden takes us inside t...)
With access to key sources, Mark Bowden takes us inside the rooms where decisions were made and on the ground where the action unfolded. After masterminding the attacks of September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden managed to vanish. Over the next ten years, as Bowden shows, America found that its war with al Qaeda - a scattered group of individuals who were almost impossible to track - demanded an innovative approach. Step by step, Bowden describes the development of a new tactical strategy to fight this war - the fusion of intel from various agencies and on-the-ground special ops.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008R070Z8/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(New York Times bestselling author Mark Bowden has had a p...)
New York Times bestselling author Mark Bowden has had a prolific career as one of America’s leading journalists and nonfiction writers. His new collection, The Three Battles of Wanat and Other True Stories, features the best of his long-form pieces on war, as well as notable profiles, sports reporting, and essays on culture. Including pieces from the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, this collection is Bowden at his best.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0163BZ2AM/?tag=2022091-20
2016
(Black Hawk Down, Hue 1968 is the story of the centerpiece...)
Black Hawk Down, Hue 1968 is the story of the centerpiece of the Tet Offensive and a turning point in the American War in Vietnam. In the early hours of January 31, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched over one hundred attacks across South Vietnam in what would become known as the Tet Offensive. The lynchpin of Tet was the capture of Hue, Vietnam’s intellectual and cultural capital, by 10,000 National Liberation Front troops who descended from hidden camps and surged across the city of 140,000. Within hours the entire city was in their hands save for two small military outposts. American commanders refused to believe the size and scope of the Front’s presence, ordering small companies of marines against thousands of entrenched enemy troops. After several futile and deadly days, Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham would finally come up with a strategy to retake the city, block by block and building by building, in some of the most intense urban combat since World War II. With unprecedented access to war archives in the U.S. and Vietnam and interviews with participants from both sides, Bowden narrates each stage of this crucial battle through multiple viewpoints. Played out over 24 days and ultimately costing 10,000 lives, the Battle of Hue was by far the bloodiest of the entire war. When it ended, the American debate was never again about winning, only about how to leave. Hue 1968 is a gripping and moving account of this pivotal moment.
https://www.amazon.com/Hue-1968-Turning-American-Vietnam/dp/0802127002/?tag=2022091-20
2017
(On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, ag...)
On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, age 10 and 12, vanished from a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C. As shock spread, then grief, a massive police effort found nothing. The investigation was shelved, and mystery endured. Then, in 2013, a cold case squad detective found something he and a generation of detectives had missed. It pointed them toward a man named Lloyd Welch, then serving time for child molestation in Delaware. As a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper, Mark Bowden covered the frantic first weeks of the story. In The Last Stone, he returns to write its ending. Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch’s sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, five skilled detectives learned to sift truth from determined lies. How do you get a compulsive liar with every reason in the world to lie to tell the truth? The Last Stone recounts a masterpiece of criminal interrogation, and delivers a chilling and unprecedented look inside a disturbing criminal mind.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Stone-Masterpiece-Criminal-Interrogation/dp/0802147305/?tag=2022091-20
2019
Mark Bowden was born on July 17, 1951, in St. Louis, Missouri. His parents are Richard Houston and Rita Lois (Keane) Bowden. Bowden grew up in Illinois, New York, and Maryland.
Bowden is a 1973 graduate of Loyola University Maryland. At college, he was inspired to embark on a career in journalism by reading Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Bowden began his journalism career in 1973 as a staff reporter for Baltimore News-American. From 1979 to 2003, Bowden was a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. In that role, he researched and wrote: "Black Hawk Down" and "Killing Pablo," both of which appeared as lengthy serials in the newspaper before being published as books. He published two books prior to these, "Doctor Dealer" and "Bringing the Heat," both of which were based on reporting he originally did for the newspaper.
Doctor Dealer, was published in 1987. The "doctor" of the title is Larry Lavin, a dentist who ran a multi-million-dollar illegal drug operation before his arrest, trial, and eventual imprisonment in the mid-1980s. Doctor Dealer charts Lavin's activities as a marijuana dealer during his college years, his progress to more lucrative dealings in cocaine, and his life as a fugitive from the justice system.
In Bringing the Heat: A Pro Football Team's Quest for Glory, Fame, Immortality, and a Bigger Piece of the Action Bowden chronicles the years he spent covering the National Football League's Philadelphia Eagles, focusing on their 1992 season and profiling several key figures associated with the team, including coach Buddy Ryan, owner Norman Braman, and players Jerome Brown, Seth Joyner, and Randall Cunningham.
Bowden's Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War first appeared as a twenty-nine-part serial in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was also adapted as a movie. The subject is the 1993 conflict between U.S. troops involved in an undeclared war with Somalian warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. The task force assigned to root him out made several unsuccessful raids, and on October 3, Aidid's militia shot down two American Black Hawk helicopters. Approximately one hundred U.S. soldiers were trapped around the crash site near Mogadishu. They were drawn into a firefight with Somalian militiamen and civilians, including children and women holding their babies along with their guns. Fifteen hours of shooting ensued, ending with five hundred Somalis and eighteen American soldiers dead. The conflict was a military disaster, a horrible embarrassment to the U.S. government, and a great human tragedy.
Another Bowden's story also became a book and a feature film. Finders Keepers: The Story of a Man Who Found $1 Million focuses on Philadelphia native Joey Coyle. In 1981 Coyle found over one million dollars in unmarked hundred dollar bills which had accidentally dropped off of an armored van. At the time, Coyle was an unemployed longshoreman who was addicted to methamphetamine. Bowden chronicles what Coyle did with the money, including an attempt to launder it, his giving some to friends, his arrest on related charges, and his subsequent trial and acquittal. The author also includes information about turning the story into a film, Money for Nothing, and Coyle's suicide shortly before its release.
Bowden is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, and has contributed to Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, Men's Journal, The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, and Rolling Stone.
Bowden has taught journalism and creative writing at Loyola University of Maryland and was Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Delaware from 2013–2017.
Bowden's latest book, The Last Stone, was published on April 2, 2019. It is Mark Bowden's account of the interrogation of a suspect in a nearly 40-year-old missing persons case.
Bowden's book, Bringing the Heat: A Pro Football Team's Quest for Glory, Fame, Immortality, and a Bigger Piece of the Action, was named one of the best sports books of 1994 by New York Times.
Bowden's book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999) about the 1993 U.S. military raid in Mogadishu, Somalia, was adapted as a motion picture of the same name and received two Academy Awards.
(What would you do if you found a million dollars? When Jo...)
2002(Killing Pablo is the story of the fifteen-month manhunt f...)
2001(On November 4, 1979, a group of radical Islamist students...)
2006(With access to key sources, Mark Bowden takes us inside t...)
2012(New York Times bestselling author Mark Bowden has had a p...)
2016(Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden’s brilliant account of the...)
1999(Black Hawk Down, Hue 1968 is the story of the centerpiece...)
2017(On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, ag...)
2019In the October 2003 issue of The Atlantic, Bowden's article "The Dark Art of Interrogation" advocated a ban on all forms of coercive interrogation. He said that in certain rare instances, interrogators would be morally justified in breaking the law and ought to face the consequences. Written more than a year before the violations of prisoners revealed at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers, he wrote: "The Bush Administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the matter. Candor and consistency are not always public virtues. Torture is a crime against humanity, but coercion is an issue that is rightly handled with a wink, or even a touch of hypocrisy; it should be banned but also quietly practiced. Those who protest coercive methods will exaggerate their horrors, which is good: it generates a useful climate of fear. It is wise of the President to reiterate U.S. support for international agreements banning torture, and it is wise for American interrogators to employ whatever coercive methods work. It is also smart not to discuss the matter with anyone."
Bowden believes young people are just as drawn to "deep" journalism as other generations have been. He said in March 2009: "Nothing will ever replace language as the medium of thought, so nothing will replace the well-written, originally-reported story, or the well-reasoned essay."
Quotations:
'It's what you do right now that makes a difference."
"Sometimes the fate of an entire nation can hinge on the integrity of one man."
"Historians say that revolutions come in a country not when things are at their worst but when they begin to improve when an entire generation has been well fed, sheltered, and educated so that it feels its strength in a way previous generations, ignorant, ill-fed, and unhealthy, did not."
Bowden married Gail Louise Mclaughlin on July 24, 1955. They have five children Aaron Bowden, Anya Bowden, William Bowden, Daniel Bowden, and Benjamin Bowden.
