"Road Work" by Mark Bowden

ROAD WORK from Mark Bowden starts off smartly with an Introduction that utilizes the full meaning of that word quite well.  It creatively introduces the reader to Mark Bowden, writer/reporter, through an interview for employment with famed newspaper editor Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post.

“I am a better writer than a reporter,” Bowden declares to Bradlee’s question on the man’s greatest weakness.  It is a remarkable touch of honesty that prepares one for what ROAD WORK has to offer: 20 stories from Bowden’s journalistic career, spanning 20 years of time, covering a myriad of topics, and providing clear, incontrovertible evidence that what he told Bradlee was true: he is a man who knows how to tell a story.

Of his stories featured, none stands above the rest.  All carry a unique character that Bowden gives voice to through his words. From ‘Tales of a Tyrant' (telling the inner world of Saddam Hussein prior to the invasion) to ‘Fight To The Finish’ (depicting the struggle of a family against bipolar disorder) to ‘The Unkindest Cut’ (detailing the rigors of high school basketball and the pressures of ‘making the team’), every article here is more than just another blasé news story one might read in passing.  Bowden tells the story, and passes along the information learned in a way that makes one sit back and go, ‘Wow.  I think I just learned something.’

‘The Kabul-Ki Dance’ was especially entertaining for me.  My father loves anything associated with airplanes, so I took notice when story number two in ROAD WORK told of fighter pilots in Kuwait and the work they did patrolling the ‘no-fly zone over Iraq’ and bombing targets in Afghanistan. 

Think ‘The Black Sheep Squadron’ sixty years later. 

The ‘dance’ part in the story involved intricate maneuvering in the sky, by a number of aircraft, all seeking to occupy the same airspace at the same time.  This would be a fascinating subject to research further, as it shows flying a plane today is more than just taking off and landing.

Perhaps the funniest of all the stories might be ‘The Great Potato Pick-Off Play’, in which minor league ballplayer Dave Bresnahan, with a team that was having less than a memorable season, decided to spark a little bit of fun into the game by picking a runner off base with a potato.  He was thrown out of baseball for the act, but the town, Williamsport Pennsylvania, still remembers him with Potato Day every season.

Has anyone ever heard of the ‘Save the Rhino’ campaign?  Have you ever heard of any ‘save the whatever’ campaign?  If you have ever wondered where the money goes, you can learn here.  ‘Rhino’, from 1982, will inform you.  It sure did me.

The only story of the twenty I found lacking – one I may have passed by if I had known how inane and insipid the piece was – was ‘Gore’s Stiff Competition’.  This was Bowden’s assignment to cover the 2000 GOP Convention that took place in Philadelphia, the city from whence he works his craft.

There was nothing here within this story that carried any appeal. It was all shallow, frivolous mess of nonsense that showed politics, and the gilded show the conventions put on, at its most superficial and vain.  It was nothing more than Republicans applauding Republicans because they were smart enough not to be Democrats.   How could a writer of Bowden’s obvious caliber, who delivered amazing stories about CIA interrogation techniques, police corruption in Philadelphia, the technology of cow breeding, and high school football in the Midwest write such fluff?

Maybe that was the idea.  I initially thought it might have something to do with own political bent (a handful of places reveal his left-leaning beliefs), but after his extremely fair handling of ‘War on Terror’-related tales (he tells the story that is there; he does not ideologically spin it), I saw ‘Gore’s Stiff Competition’ for what it was.  Politics is insipid and inane.  It is a show orchestrated to convince the unbeliever there is something beneath that façade, when in truth there is not.  Bowden’s story simply revealed that.  Thus, in essence, there was no story to write.

However, within this compendium of his work, there are stories to read.  ROAD WORK contains twenty of them that convince me to look for the name Mark Bowden the next time I am flipping through a magazine or glancing over a paper’s headlines.  The man does his ROAD WORK.