"Mark Robert Bowden " is an American writer and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (magazine)/Vanity Fair. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he is a 1973 graduate of Loyola University Maryland. While at Loyola, he was inspired to embark on a journalistic career by reading Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In 2010, in his acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award at the National Book Awards, Wolfe called Bowden one of the two "writers to watch" (along with Michael Lewis (author)/Michael Lewis).

From 1979-2003, Bowden was a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Over the years, he has written for The New Yorker, Men's Journal, The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, and Rolling Stone. Some of his awards are listed below.

As a result of his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, Bowden has received international recognition. The book was made into Black Hawk Down (film)/a 2001 movie directed by Ridley Scott.

He currently lives in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Bowden's son, Aaron, is also a writer. Bowden's own father, now deceased, was a first cousin of former Florida State Seminoles football coach Bobby Bowden.

More Mark Bowden on Wikipedia.

Qusay [was] reputed to be a far quieter, more disciplined figure [than Uday].

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There were signs everywhere saying, 'If you loot, we shoot,' ... The first looter we had, they had ripped his ear off. They really tore him up.

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If you go down there and see that, and you're not more appreciative of what you've got and how lucky you are, there is something wrong with you.

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The question posed by Yossarian in 'Catch-22,' ... is one of the great questions of modern times: Is this huge industrial military that we've constructed, has it become more deadly and powerful than the cause for which is was constructed?

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In order to make it more difficult for people to tell exactly where he [was], all the palaces [functioned] as though [he were] present.

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'Catch-22' undermines the whole heroic logic of World War II, ... It was really refreshing and interesting for me, as a young man learning about modern history and literature, to see how powerful a single writer could be in undermining the whole social mind-set.

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I'm tired of the FEMA-bashing. All you hear is that FEMA didn't do enough. What people don't understand is that FEMA had a game plan, but when the devastation was so widespread, their game plan kind of went out the window.

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There's just a stench of things rotting, decaying - dead seafood, poultry, other things I can't talk about. It gets into your nose; it gets into your clothes. You can't get away from it.

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I remember sitting on my back porch, starting to read it, and thinking, 'I wonder what this is about?'

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