Anyone who has read Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down or Killing Pablo knows that he is capable of putting us in the heat of a story in a way few writers can. Road Work gathers the best of his award-winning writing, from his breakout stories for the Philadelphia Inquirer to his influential pieces in the Atlantic on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whether traveling to Zambia, where a team of antipoachers fights to save the black rhino, to Guantánamo Bay to expose the controversial ways America is fighting its war on terror, or to a small town in Rhode Island to penetrate the largest cocaine ring in history, Bowden takes us down rough roads previously off limits—and gives us another gripping read.

Tales of the Tyrant

The Kabulki Dance

The Art of Interrogation

Al Sharpton profile

Salon Republican National Convention 2000

The Game of a Lifetime

The Unkindest Cut

Schmidt's Misfortune

The Great Potato Pick-Off Play

Rhino

The Urban Gorilla

Breeding the Better Cow

Battling the Baddies in Fantasyland

Fight to the Finish

Fight with Fame (Norman Mailer)

The Fight Rocky Lost

Mayberry Vice

Cops on the Take

"Bowden’s range is broad. . . . With heartbreaking detail, [these pieces] reveal his most effective reporting tool: empathy." —Entertainment Weekly (A)

"Mark Bowden is a master of narrative journalism." —The New York Times Book Review