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  • Guests of the Ayatollah

  • The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam
  • By: Mark Bowden
  • Narrated by: Mark Bowden
  • Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (5 ratings)

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Guests of the Ayatollah

By: Mark Bowden
Narrated by: Mark Bowden
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Publisher's Summary

On November 4, 1979, a group of radical Islamist students, inspired by revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They took 52 Americans hostage and kept nearly all of them captive 444 days.

The Iran hostage crisis was a watershed moment in American history. It was America's first showdown with Islamic fundamentalism, a confrontation at the forefront of American policy to this day. It was also a powerful dramatic story that captivated the American people, launched yellow-ribbon campaigns, made celebrities of the hostage's families, and crippled the reelection campaign of President Jimmy Carter.

Mark Bowden tells this sweeping story through the eyes of the hostages, their radical, naive captors, the soldiers sent on the impossible mission to free them, and the diplomats working to end the crisis. Taking listeners from the Oval Office to the hostages' cells, Guests of the Ayatollah is a remarkably detailed, brilliantly re-created, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.
Listen to an interview with Mark Bowden on Fresh Air.
©2006 Mark Bowden (P)2006 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. Audioworks is an imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division
  • Abridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History
United States Middle East World Freedom & Security Politics & Government Political Science War & Crisis
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Critic Reviews

"Bowden keeps tension high." (Booklist)

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