Bowden a Guest at University of Washington

Mark Bowden, author of the best-seller Black Hawk Down spoke at the University of Washington last night to publicize his lastest, Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam. Bowden has been touring for months, but he is still enthusiastic about this story, leaning eagerly forward onto his hands as he spoke.

He told a few anecdotes about his research (including a bizarre interview with a former hostage-taker, current high-ranking Iranian official, who wants to lure Americans to his vacation resort instead of tying them to chairs) and about the hostages and their families.

Guests of the Ayatollah attempts to tell three stories, Bowden explained; the story of the hostages, the story of the rescue attempt, and the story of Jimmy Carter's Presidency swirling down the drain.

The sage of the Iran hostage crisis is immense (Bowden claims that contemporary news coverage alone filled ten boxes of paper during his research) and one of Bowden's challenges was digesting it down to a manageable level. The original manuscript, he reports, was over 1100 pages long. The published version is a slimmer but still daunting 700 pages. Doorstop or narrative non-fiction? You decide!

Either way, the documentary based on the book that's scheduled to air on June 26th at 8:00 PM on the Discovery Channel sounds like a good bet.