Mark Bowden has 13 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 11 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 99 ratings. The most-rated is Black Hawk Down.
Black Hawk Down
Summary
Ninety-nine elite American soldiers are trapped in the middle of a hostile city. As night falls, they are surrounded by thousands of enemy gunmen. Their wounded are bleeding to death. Their ammunition and supplies are dwindling. This is the story of how they got there - and how they fought their way out. This is the story of war. Black Hawk Down drops you into a crowded marketplace in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia with the U.S. Special Forces and puts you in the middle of the most intense firelight American soldiers have fought since the Vietnam war. Late in the afternoon of Sunday, October 3, 1993, the soldiers of Task Form Ranger were sent on a mission to capture two top lieutenants of a renegade warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take them about an hour. Instead, they were pinned down through a long and terrible night, locked in a desperate struggle to kill or be killed. When the unit was finally rescued the following morning, 18 American soldiers were dead and dozens more badly injured. The Somali toll was far worse; more than five hundred felled and over a thousand wounded. Award-winning literary journalist Mark Bowden's dramatic narrative captures this harrowing ordeal through the eyes of the young men who fought that day. He draws on his extensive interviews of participants from both sides - as well as classified combat video and radio transcripts - to bring their stories to life. Authoritative, gripping, and insightful, Black Hawk Down is a riveting look at the terror and exhilaration of combat destined to become a classic of war reporting.
©1999 Mark Bowden (P)2012 Simon and Schuster
The Last Stone
Summary
The true story of a cold case, a compulsive liar, and five determined detectives, from the number-one New York Times best-selling author and “master journalist” (The Wall Street Journal). On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, ages 10 and 12, vanished from a shopping mall in suburban Washington, DC. As shock spread, then grief, a massive police effort found nothing. The investigation was shelved, and the 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. The acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down and Hue 1968 had been a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper at the time of the original disappearance, and 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.
©2019 Mark Bowden. Recorded by arrangement with Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2019 Audible, Inc.
Hue 1968
Summary
Not since his New York Times best seller Black Hawk Down has Mark Bowden written a book about a battle. His most ambitious work yet, Hu? 1968, is the story of the centerpiece of the Tet Offensive and a turning point in the American War in Vietnam. By January 1968, despite an influx of half a million American troops, the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which "the end begins to come into view". The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke. Part military action and part popular uprising, the Tet Offensive included attacks across South Vietnam, but the most dramatic and successful would be the capture of Hu?, the country's cultural capital. At 2:30 a.m. on January 31, 10,000 National Liberation Front troops descended from hidden camps and surged across the city of 140,000. By morning, all of Hu? was in Front hands save for two small military outposts. The commanders in country and politicians in Washington refused to believe the size and scope of the Front's presence. Captain Chuck Meadows was ordered to lead his 160-marine Golf Company against thousands of enemy troops in the first attempt to reenter Hu? later that day. 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 US and Vietnam and interviews with participants from both sides, Bowden narrates each stage of this crucial battle through multiple points of view. Played out over 24 days of terrible fighting and ultimately costing 10,000 combatant and civilian lives, the Battle of Hu? 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. In Hu? 1968, Bowden masterfully reconstructs this pivotal moment in the American War in Vietnam.
©2017 Mark Bowden (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
Killing Pablo
Summary
On July 22, 1992, Colombian druglord Pablo Escobar walked out of the luxurious prison he built for himself and disappeared into the Colombian jungle. His audacious escape destroyed the nation's tenuous cease-fire with its infamous narcos, and pushed it into open war with the Medellin drug cartel. Over the coming days and weeks, the United States launched a joint military and intelligence operation with the Colombian government, assembling a team of expert personnel and an arsenal of state-of-the-art weaponry and surveillance technology the likes of which the world had never seen. Their mission: to track down Pablo. But this time, they knew it would not be enough to just capture Escobar. This time, they would have to finish the job. This time, they were going to kill him.
©2001 Mark Bowden, All Rights Reserved (P)2001 Simon & Schuster Inc.
Finders Keepers
Summary
Who hasn't dreamed of finding a million dollars? Joey Coyle was down and out - the affable, boyish South Philadelphian hadn't found dock work in months, he was living with his ailing mother, and he was fighting a drug habit and what seemed like a lifetime of bouncing into and out of bad luck. One morning, while cruising the streets just blocks from his home, fate took a turn worthy of Hollywood when he spotted a curious yellow tub he thought might make a good toolbox. It contained $1.2 million in unmarked bills - casino money that had just fallen off the back of an armored truck. Detective Pat Laurenzi, with the help of the FBI, was working around the clock to track it down. Joey Coyle, meanwhile, was off on a bungling, swashbuckling misadventure, sharing his windfall with everyone from his girlfriend to total strangers to the two neighborhood kids who drove him past it. To hide the money, Joey turned to the local mob boss - a shadowy, fearsome man who may or may not have helped launder it. But as adrenaline-filled nights began taking their toll, Joey Coyle's dream-come-true evolved into a nightmare: Whom could he trust? By one of our most evocative and versatile chroniclers of American life, Finders Keepers is not only a gripping true-life thriller; it is the remarkable tale of an ordinary man faced with an extraordinary dilemma, and the fascinating reactions - from complicity to concern to betrayal - of the friends, family, and neighbors to whom he turns.
©2002 Mark Bowden, All Rights Reserved (P)2002 Simon & Schuster Inc., All Rights Reserved, AUDIOWORKS Is an Imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster Inc.
Doctor Dealer
Summary
Doctor Dealer is the story of Larry Lavin, a bright, charismatic young man who rose from his working-class upbringing to win a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, earn Ivy League college and dental degrees, and buy his family a house in one of Philadelphia's most exclusive suburbs. But behind the facade of his success was a dark secret - at every step of the way he was building the foundation for a cocaine empire that would grow to generate over $60 million in annual sales. Award-winning journalist Mark Bowden tells the saga of Lavin's rise and fall with the gripping, novelistic narrative style that won him international acclaim as the author of the New York Times best-seller Black Hawk Down.
©1987 Mark Bowden. Afterword copyright 2001 by Mark Bowden. Recorded by arrangement with Grove/Atlantic, Inc. (P)2013 Audible Inc.
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
Summary
The number-one New York Times best-selling “master of narrative journalism” (New York Times) and author of Black Hawk Down presents a compelling collection of true crime stories.
©2020 by Mark Bowden. “The Incident at Alpha Tau Omega” appeared originally in the Philadelphia Enquirer; “why don’t u tell me wht ur into,” “The Case of the Vanishing Blonde,” “ . . . A Million Years Ago,” and “The Body in Room 348” appeared originally in Vanity Fair; “Who Killed Euhommie Bond?” appeared originally in Air Mail. Recorded by arrangement with Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
Tame the Primitive Brain
Summary
A number one anxiety in business is dealing with problem people. Unfortunately, try as you might, you can't fix others - but you can manage your reactions to their behavior. When you tame your most impulsive, primitive reactions to the crazy situations you face every day, you'll help others do the same. Tame the Primitive Brain offers a new and simple system to understanding and controlling the behavior of others. Noted body language, behavior, and communication expert Mark Bowden explains the fastest and most effective ways to understand why someone acts toward you the way they do; why you react to their behavior in the way you do; and most important, what exactly to do to achieve the right outcomes. With these proven tools and tricks, you'll gain enhanced confidence to deal with tricky behaviors and effectively manage relationships at any level in an organization.Over the course of 28 days, you can learn how to become more influential and persuasive in every situation, giving you a competitive advantage in navigating a myriad of difficult behaviors. Bolstered by the latest evolutionary behavioral theory and neuroscientific evidence, Tame the Primitive Brain details a step-by-step system for understanding the behavior of others and the best tools to manage them, including: How your primitive brain quickly categorizes new people and how this affects your interactions with them How to go beyond more comfortable one-on-one relationships to establish connections with a group of team members How to identify tribal behaviors and change a problematic tribal reputation How asserting organizational values can direct team members' behavior better than simply laying out a set of rules Your instincts will never change, but you can learn to manage your impulses better, and in effect, manage the knee-jerk reactions of others. Tame the Primitive Brain dives deep into our reptilian brain and shows you how.
©2013 Mark Bowden (P)2013 Gildan Media LLC
Worm
Summary
Worm: The First Digital World War tells the story of the Conficker worm, a potentially devastating piece of malware that has baffled experts and infected more than twelve million computers worldwide. When Conficker was unleashed in November 2008, cybersecurity experts did not know what to make of it. Exploiting security flaws in Microsoft Windows, it grew at an astonishingly rapid rate, infecting millions of computers around the world within weeks. Once the worm infiltrated one system it was able to link it with others to form a single network under illicit outside control known as a “botnet.” This botnet was soon capable of overpowering any of the vital computer networks that control banking, telephones, energy flow, air traffic, health-care information — even the Internet itself. Was it a platform for criminal profit or a weapon controlled by a foreign power or dissident organization? Surprisingly, the U.S. government was only vaguely aware of the threat that Conficker posed, and the task of mounting resistance to the worm fell to a disparate but gifted group of geeks, Internet entrepreneurs, and computer programmers. But when Conficker’s controllers became aware that their creation was encountering resistance, they began refining the worm’s code to make it more difficult to trace and more powerful, testing the Cabal lock’s unity and resolve. Will the Cabal lock down the worm before it is too late? Game on.
©2011 Mark Bowden (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Three Battles of Wanat and Other True Stories
Summary
New York Times best-selling 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. The titular article, "The Three Battles of Wanat", tells the story of one of the bloodiest days in the war in Afghanistan and the extraordinary years-long fallout it generated within the United States military. In "The Killing Machines", Bowden examines the strategic, legal, and moral issues surrounding armed drones. And in a brilliant piece on Kim Jong-un, "The Bright Sun of Juche", he recalibrates our understanding of the world's youngest and most baffling dictator. Also included are profiles of newspaper scion Arthur Sulzberger; renowned defense attorney and anti-death-penalty activist Judy Clarke; and David Simon, the creator of The Wire. Absorbing and provocative, The Three Battles of Wanat is an essential collection for fans of Mark Bowden's writing and for anyone who enjoys first-rate narrative nonfiction.
©2016 Mark Bowden. (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
The Best Game Ever
Summary
On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for that season's NFL Championship game. Football, growing in popularity amid America's post-war economic boom, was still greatly over-shadowed by the country's favored pastime - baseball - but the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football. On the field and roaming the sidelines were 17 future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti, and Giants greats Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and assistant coaches Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry. Played on a freezing Sunday evening in front of 64,000 fans and an estimated 45 million television viewers around the country - at that time the largest crowd to have ever watched a football game - the championship would become the first sudden-death contest in NFL history. With two minutes left in regulation, Baltimore had possession deep in its own territory, and the ball in the hands of the still unproven quarterback Johnny Unitas. The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the history of American sports. Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the championship, it is destined to be a sports classic.
©2008 Mark Bowden (P)2008 Brilliance Audio
Truth and Lies
Summary
A fresh, insightful guide to reading body language in the post-digital age Whether you're at a job interview or a cocktail party, searching LinkedIn, or swiping right on a dating site, you want (no - need) to understand what people are really thinking, regardless of what they're saying. Understanding what others are trying to tell you with their posture, hand gestures, eye contact (or lack thereof), or incessant fiddling with their iPhone might all be even more important than what you're projecting yourself. Do they plan on making a deal with your company? Are they lying to you? Can you trust this person with your most intimate secrets? Knowing what others are thinking can tell you when to run with an opportunity and when not to waste your time, whether at work, in a crucial negotiation or on a promising first date. Best-selling authors Mark Bowden and Tracey Thomson, principals at the communications company Truthplane, illustrate the essential points of body language with examples from everyday life, leavened with humor and insights that you can use to your advantage in virtually any situation.
©2018 Mark Bowden and Tracey Thomson (P)2021 Tantor
Guests of the Ayatollah
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.
©2006 Mark Bowden (P)2006 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. Audioworks is an imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division