World Affairs Council of Dallas-Fort Worth presents Mark Bowden (Fort Worth)

October 25, 2017 11:30 am - 1:00 pm

When

October 25, 2017 | 11:30 am - 1:00 pm

What

Fort Worth Event on October 25, 2017, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Dallas Event on October 25, 2017, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Historians give these starting and ending dates for the Vietnam War: November 1, 1955, and April 30, 1975. On that April day, nine months after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency of a nation divided by both war and Watergate, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and America fled the South.


The war that has been a constant unpleasant factor on front pages and the evening news for years had ended. How did that happen after the investment of so many lives?


Best-selling author of Black Hawk Down, journalist Mark Bowden has written a book with an explanatory title: Hue 1968 – A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam.
The Tet Offensive, one of the largest campaigns of the war, began January 30, 1968. The battle of Hue began in the early hours of January 31. It lasted through March 2. Thousands of people were killed, including 216 Americans.
Kirkus Reviews describes Bowden’s book as “A stirring history of the 1968 battle that definitively turned the Vietnam War into an American defeat…. One of the best books on a single action in Vietnam, written by a tough, seasoned journalist who brings the events of a half-century past into sharp relief.”
Bowden, who spent 20 years as a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, currently is national correspondent for the Atlantic and writes for Vanity Fair and other publications.

Bowden’s Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999) was an international bestseller that spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list – Bowden also contributed to the screenplay for the film version of the book. His other books include Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (2001), the story of the hunt Pablo Escobar, Columbia’s “cocaine billionaire.” Other works include Doctor Dealer (1987), Bringing the Heat (1994), Our Finest Day (2002) and Finders Keepers (2002).
Bowden graduated from Loyola College of Maryland in 1973 with a B.A. in English Literature. He is an adjunct professor there, teaching creative writing and journalism. He also is writer-in-residence at the University of Delaware.

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