A Main Selection of the Military History Book Club Featured Alternate of the Literary Guild A National Book Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book
“Black Hawk Down ranks among the best books ever written about infantry combat ... A descendant of books like The Killer Angels and We Were Soldiers Once.”
—Bob Shacochis, The New York Observer
“Bowden captures the essence of combat—the sights and sounds, the terror and the determination, the sheer will to survive. If Black Hawk Down were fiction, we’d rank it up there with the best war novels, The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, or The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.”
—Tom Walker, The Denver Post
“Stands in a league with Shelby Foote’s stirring Civil War diary, Shiloh—rare in its completeness and reverence for the valor of young men cast into extraordinary circumstances.”
—Jim Haner, The Baltimore Sun
“One of the most gripping and authoritative accounts of combat ever written.”
—Kirk Spitzer, USA Today
“Riveting.”
—Mark Yost, The Wall Street Journal
“I can’t remember having read such good reporting of a combat engagement ... Journalistic writing at its best.”
—Don Murray, The Boston Globe
“Mark Bowden ... has told the story with a driving narrative in a treatment that proceeds with dignity like the measured tread of history, yet glows with the passion of a memoir.”
—San Antonio Express News
“Bowden’s story has a vitality and freshness usually lacking in accounts of combat. He has written an extraordinary book. It is also a shocking one.”
—Brian Urquhart, The New York Review of Books
“Black Hawk Down has the power of an ambush ... a suspenseful and gruesome account of modern war that’s impossible to put down.”
—Orlando Sentinel
“Black Haw Down is destined to become a military classic.”
—The Washington Times
“Amazing ... one of the most intense, visceral reading experiences imaginable.”
—Michael Maren, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Black Hawk Down may one day stand as one of the most realistic books ever written about soldiers under fire and, by extension, the role of the American military in a post-superpower, police-action world.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A vivid, immediate and unsparing narrative that is filled with blood and noise ... It bears comparison to S.L.A. Marshall’s classic account of a battle in Korea, Pork Chop Hill.”
—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
“Black Hawk Down will occupy an honored place in my personal library.”
—General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff