4.0
Guests of the Ayatollah
ByPublisher Description
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
, 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.
is a detailed, brilliantly recreated, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.
"The passions of the moment still reverberate . . . you can feel them on every page." —
"A complex story full of cruelty, heroism, foolishness and tragic misunderstandings." —
"Essential reading . . . A." —
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesGuests of the Ayatollah Reviews
4.0
“Good summary of the Iran hostage crisis. I listened to the abridged version, which seemed to cover all the bases. Usually I dislike abridged versions but given the level of detail in this one, it’s hard to imagine listening to the full version to get even more detail. The detail around the botched Delta Force rescue and the events leading up to their release.”
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