breathtaking recount of the infamous hostage taking of US embassy which eliminated democratic hope for Iran and brought politics to a complete halt. Three decades after, US hardly involves himself with the trauma, but Iran's soul as a nation is haunted by the ghosts of this act of terror.

Great book about the Iranian Hostage crisis. Being born in the late 1970s, I do not remember this on TV (obviously). But some of the action was riveting...at times it felt like a novel. I really liked the parts where Bowden takes the reader inside the Carter Administration. For those of you who criticize his handling of the situation, how would YOU have handled it?? It was an impossible situation. Also, similar to "The Looming Tower", by Lawrence Wright, the book helps us answer the question, "Why do they hate us so much?" And in Iran's case, I kind of agree with their views (not to the point of taking hostages...but the U.S. did treat Iran like crap). Another tidbit from the book that I enjoyed was the revelation that one of the hostage-takers did not know that Japan had started WWII with the U.S. She thought we dropped the atomic bomb for no reason! UNBELIEVABLE!

I'm a big fan of Mark Bowden and this is my favorite book he's written (I've read all of them). I was in my early teens at the time of the Iran hostage crisis and have memories of the nightly news reports but never truly knew the story until after I read this book. It's a great read even if the events didn't happen during your lifetime.

The are few international events over the last fifty years that are remembered with as much infamy as the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-1980. I was fairly young at the time and wasn’t familiar with the intricacies, yet I distinctly remember the anger and sorrow of my fellow citizens. Before November 4, 1979, I would guess most Americans couldn’t find Iran on the map. Nor were they familiar with names such as the Ayatollah Khomeni, or the recently exiled Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

When this book was written 25 years after the crisis, my guess is many still didn’t know much of the details, which was the entire point of this book. This is an excellent read. It’s a long read at about 700 pages, but it never feels that way. Mark Bowden knows how to keep this story at a high enough level to where he never gets mired too low in the weeds with too much detail.

The main focus is the hostages. The individuals that had the misfortune of simply working at the American Embassy in Tehran and were very familiar with the hostility of the residents of this country. When the tempers flared on that ignoble day and the compound was stormed by the radical students, the American workers at the embassy weren’t too concerned. They had all been through this before to some extent.

Well, as the dots get connected, it soon becomes apparent that this is not a temporal event to exorcize political futility. This is the real deal. Soon the crisis is the headline on every newspaper and the leading story on every news network for months. Like most tragedies, the longer it goes on, the more the public forgets. No one expected the captives to be held hostage for a grueling 444 days, and after the first months pass, much of world forgets about the prisoners.

There are a lot of names to keep track of within this book. I’m not sure how many of the 53 hostages that Bowden focuses on, he goes back and forth rather quickly, and I had trouble keeping track of every hostage, their backgrounds, their roles, their history, etc. Yet this really doesn’t take much away from the overall reading experience. When we read about the travails of each hostage, the “who” really isn’t as important as the “what”. Which brings me to the title of this book. Although I would never minimize the horror that these individuals endured, the author asserts that the hostages, for the most part, were treated better than one might imagine. In some instances one might be able to argue that they were “guests” as opposed to “hostages”. Some of the captors were much more friendly than others, and things such as Christmas parties and the ability to write letters home were part of the captivity. During the middle of the ordeal, Iran finds itself at war with neighboring Iraq, and the students even entertain the possibility of arming their captives to assist them in fighting the enemy. That’s not to say it was all sunshine and roses. There were plenty of times when the captives would be beaten or isolated, usually for insubordination and for insults hurled by the hostages themselves. And we can never kid ourselves into thinking that anytime someone is a “hostage”, that it could ever be acceptable or tolerable.

One of the more unlikely elements of this tragedy is that Iran really didn’t have any kind of structural government in place, so the students who raided the embassy and started the whole event really didn’t have any authority to do so. Once the crisis started, you almost got the impression that the captors, and the country itself, really didn’t know what to do next. Their only demand was that the Shah be returned, but once that became obviously impossible, you could tell that this whole event was perpetrated by amateurs. Add the fact that the country was essentially run by the hardcore cleric Khomeni, there wasn’t really much that could be done other than wait for some sort of unknown future event to somehow unfold to change the situation.

The author also spends good portions of the book describing the U.S. government under Jimmy Carter’s efforts to end the standoff, the planning and failure of the rescue attempt, and also the history of the relations between Iran and the United States. Sadly, what many Americans at the time failed to acknowledge was the fact that the United States wasn’t exactly squeakly clean when they orchestrated a coup in Iran back in 1953 that ousted leader Mohammed Mosaddegh that put the Shah back on the throne. Let’s just say that the motivation of the United States was a far cry from anything altruistic or philanthropic.

The chapters are also nice and brief. Most chapters are about 10-15 pages long which helps with such a thick volume. This also allows us to never get bored and we can quickly jump from one part of the story to another. As someone who reads a lot of history, I wish many authors would learn such a method. The author also includes an epilogue that tells the reader “where are they now” 25 years after the conclusion of this horrific event.

Overall this was a great account of an infamous time in the history of America. I’m sure there have been multiple books written about this event, but my guess is that this is probably the best one to give the reader a strong sense of the whole picture of everything and everyone involved.

من أفشل ما قرأت من كتب في هذا المجال.

I found this to be a very interesting account of these events. Knowing one of the Marine helicopter pilots who was part of the rescue mission but also never having heard anymore about this from him I wanted to know more. This gave me a totally new perspective since I learned many things that weren't in the newspapers or on tv at the time all this was happening. The author did extensive research, interviewed participants on both sides and traveled to Iran several times as he worked on the book. The narrative is very accessible, not dry as historical accounts can sometimes be.

During the Carter Administration, representing the United States in foreign countries proved to be exceptionally risky and dangerous. On November 4, 1979, after the Islamic Administration became successful, Iranian students took the embassy and took hostage more than 50 Americans. This nonfiction book reads with the intensity of a thriller while offering a chronicle of the Iran hostage situation. Journalist Bowen narrates this story through the perspectives of the hostages while also opening doors to the hostages cells and the Oval Office. It took more than a year for the Iranians to release the hostages but it didn't take long for the entire debacle to completely undermine the Carter Administration and his lack of initiative toward foreign policy struggles. By relying on extensive research and interviews, this book dives into the hostage experiences, political ramifications, and the cultural/ ideological divides that fueled this crisis. This novel like take on the Iran Hostage Crisis echoes the pivotal moment in which diplomacy, foreign affairs, and military involvement in Iran would forever change for US citizens and other countries.

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Definitely a good read. It gives a good outline of modern Iranian history and lots of specifics about the day to day of the hostage crisis both in Tehran and in the United States. Operation Eagle Claw is well covered and the damage done to the Carter presidency is dealt with in an even-handed way.

Nothing to criticize here. Bowden’s take is engaging and top notch.

From the early takeover in February and the complete lack of defense of the embassy to the escape attempts by the hostages and the outlandish mindset of many Iranians this book brims with insight and enlightenment.

Also, Bowden does a solid job of depicting how one can quickly become compromising with ones captors.

Would have been five stars if he didn’t include the epilogue which really distorted my feelings about the book. The epilogue put such a bad taste in my mouth, you can tell it was written amid the war on terror and it reads poorly today and tinges the rest of the rather brilliantly written history.

I have read other books where the taking of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979 was a side note to the main story I was reading about and I have seen movies and documentaries on this event but Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam by Mark Bowden is the first detailed account that I have read of what actually happened as told by many of the actual hostages, some of the students, and the soldiers who took part in an ill-fated rescue attempt about their interactions with and treatment by these students during their long captivity. 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 hostage, and kept nearly all of them hostage for 444 days. The author takes us inside the hostages' cells and inside the Oval Office for meetings with President Carter and his exhausted team. He covers the many international meetings and negotiations around the world that focused on helping to resolve this hostage crisis. He also dedicated five years to this research, including numerous trips to Iran and countless interviews with those involved on both sides. Guests of the Ayatollah is a detailed, brilliantly re-created, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.

Even prior to Argo's popularity, I always found myself incredibly interested in the Iranian Revolution. This is for two primary reasons: 1. it was a revolution in which the outcome wasn't preordained or even mass imagined. Indeed, it was described by both its actors and American observers as "unthinkable." The revolutionaries themselves were not a monolithic group; it was a surprising assembly of leftest students, religious madrassa students, secular intellectuals, and Shia islamists intent upon seeing Ayatollah Khomeini's world vision realized in Iran.

What these groups shared was a deep hatred for the American supported Shah and the decades of torture, corruption, and cruelty to which he and his secret police, the SAVAK, subjected the Iranian people to. Which brings me to my second reason: 2. Despite Iran's current backwards mullah-dominated "government," and the direction in which the revolution eventually went, I find myself empathizing with the sentiments of Iranians on this one: they were tired of the Shah, resentful of the CIA orchestrated coup that brought him to power OVER the democratically elected leader at the time, suspicious of further American meddling in their domestic choices.

Granted, the world was different then.

Kermit Rooselvelt designed the coup to keep Soviet expansion in check. The Shah promised America "stability" and easy access to his country's oil. It was a complicated, interesting Iran, and Bowden's fine book captures one of the key events--the US Embassy takeover by a group of students inspired by and loyal to Khomeini.

All of that said, many of those involved in the embassy takeover were thugs, and the arrogance and criminality of that act was indicative of the ideology which would come today to be known as Islamism or Islamofascism. These "students" claimed allegiance to the Ayatollah Khomeini and ascribe to a world view which is Manichean (black and white, good and evil), and thus desirous of bulldozing the very complexity with which the revolution burgeoned. These students and their leaders claim to know the will of God, to believe that modern politics and foreign policy should be dictated by holy books that are centuries old, and that the takeover of the American Embassy was necessary because (despite all evidence to the contrary) they were SURE that it was a "den of spies." These views are illustrative of a desire to return to an imagined idyllic and simple past where choice was circumscribed by God's constant involvement in mankind's affairs. Very few of us live in or desire a reality like that, despite its obvious offers of peace of mind and simplicity. The hostage crisis was, in some ways, the first conflict of these ideologies; ironically, as Bowden points out, while the takeover was a REJECTION of diplomacy as a manner of politic, it was ended solely through diplomacy. An important lesson indeed. As Bowden points out, however, the conflict didn't HAVE to end that way, as many Americans and Iranians pushed for very different conclusions.

Bowden shares amazing anecdotes about the relationship between the hostages and their captors while keeping an eye on the impossibly patient political machinations of the Carter administration in attempting, but repeatedly failing to get the hostages released. Granted, he had few good choices, and all of them were likely to make life for the hostages worse.

It is a delicious irony that Saddam Hussein's surprise bombing and invasion of Iran led to the hostages being released. Iran released the hostages so that America would honor Iran's previous arms purchases and unfreeze Iranian investments in America which she needed to defend herself against Iraq.

This book is tremendous, and Bowden's tone and selection of detail suggest that he, too, views these events as endlessly fascinating, enormously complex, and still influential.