Audiobooks by Mark Bowden

Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore’s Deadliest Gang Leader

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes readers inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight of its members in prison Sandtown is one of the deadliest neighborhoods in the world; it earned Baltimore its nickname Bodymore, Murderland, and was made notorious by David Simon’s classic HBO series The Wire. Drug deals dominate street corners, and ruthless, casual violence abounds. Montana Barronette grew up in the center of it all. He was the leader of the gang “Trained to Go,” or TTG, and when he was finally arrested and sentenced to life in prison, he had been labeled “Baltimore’s Number One Trigger Puller.” Under Tana’s reign, TTG dominated Sandtown. After a string of murders are linked to TTG, each with dozens of witnesses too intimidated to testify, three detectives set out to put Tana in prison for life. For them, this was never about drugs: it was about serial murder. An acclaimed journalist who spent his youth in the white suburbs of Baltimore, Mark Bowden returns to the city with exclusive access to the FBI files and unprecedented insight into one of the city’s deadliest gangs and its notorious leader. As he traces the rise and fall of TTG, Bowden uses wiretapped drug buys, police interviews, undercover videos, text messages, social media posts, trial transcripts, and his own ongoing conversations with Tana’s family and community to create the most in-depth account of an inner-city gang ever written. With his signature precision and propulsive narrative, Mark Bowden positions Tana—as a boy, a gang leader, a killer, and now a prisoner—in the context of Baltimore and America, illuminating his path for what it really was: a life sentence.

Mark Bowden (Author), L.J. Ganser (Narrator)

Audiobook

Truth and Lies: What People Are Really Thinking

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. Bestselling 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.

Mark Bowden, Tracey Thomson (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

Audiobook

Tame the Primitive Brain: 28 Ways in 28 Days to Manage the Most Impulsive Behaviors at Work

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.

Mark Bowden (Author), Erik Synnestvedt (Narrator)

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Black Hawk Down

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 was send 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, eighteen 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.

Mark Bowden (Author), Alan Sklar (Narrator)

Audiobook

Worm: The First Digital World War

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.

Mark Bowden (Author), Christopher Lane (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Best Game Ever

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 seventeen 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 forty-five 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 fiftieth anniversary of the championship, it is destined to be a sports classic.

Mark Bowden (Author), Phil Gigante (Narrator)

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Guests of the Ayatollah

November 4, 1979. A group of radical Islamist students, inspired by revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran, take fifty-three Americans hostage and keep them captive for 444 days. GUESTS OF THE AYATOLLAH tells the complete story of the Iran hostage crisis, America's first battle with militant Islam.

Mark Bowden (Author), Mark Bowden (Narrator)

Audiobook

Finders Keepers

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: who 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.

Mark Bowden (Author), Mark Bowden (Narrator)

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Killing Pablo

Includes enhanced CD with exclusive video of the actual hunt for Pablo Escobar 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 ceasefire 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. Killing Pablo is the inside story of the brutal rise and violent fall of Colombian cocaine cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. Bowden's gripping narrative sounds as if it were torn from the pages of a military technothriller. Action-packed and unputdownable, Killing Pablo is a tour de force of investigative journalism and a stark portrayal of rough justice in the real world.

Mark Bowden (Author), Mark Bowden (Narrator)

Audiobook