Join us for a conversation between writers - a new series at the Kennett Library hosted by Mark Bowden. This first event will feature author and journalist Scott Shane. 

Purchase your tickets here!

Mark Bowden is the author of fifteen books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down. He reported at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and now writes for the Atlantic and other magazines.

His books include Black Hawk Down, Huế 1968, and The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden. His book Black Hawk Down, a finalist for the National Book Award, was the basis of the film of the same name. His book Killing Pablo won the Overseas Press Club’s 2001 Cornelius Ryan Award for book of the year. Among his other books are Guests of the Ayatollah, an account of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, which Newsweek listed as one of “The 50 Books for Our Times.” His other books include The Best Game Ever, the story of the 1958 NFL championship game; Worm, which tells the story of the Conficker computer worm, based on the article “The Enemy Within,” published in this magazine; The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden; and Huế 1968. 

Bowden has received the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award and the International Thriller Writers’ True Thriller Award for lifetime achievement. A reporter and columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer for more than 30 years, Bowden has been an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware.

Scott Shane was a reporter for 15 years at The New York Times, where he was twice a member of teams that won Pulitzer Prizes, and before that, for 21 years at The Baltimore Sun. His two previous books are Dismantling Utopia, a firsthand account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Objective Troy, the story of an American terrorist killed in a drone strike on orders of President Obama. He has been a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught courses on media and on the Russian attack on the 2016 American presidential election—more at scottshane.org.

Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland.

FLEE NORTH unearths the lost story of Thomas Smallwood, who was born into slavery in Maryland, bought his freedom, educated himself, and became a shoemaker in Southwest Washington, a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. Smallwood began to organize mass escapes from slavery by the wagonload, with the help of a young white partner, Charles Torrey — and wrote about the escapes in extraordinary satirical dispatches for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany. It was Smallwood, Scott Shane discovered, who gave the underground railroad its name. Smallwood’s daring operation took place against the very dark background of the domestic slave trade, which thrived on Washington’s Mall and at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, shipping thousands of people every year away from their families to the cotton and sugar plantations of the deep south. The book’s third central character, Baltimore’s Hope Slatter, was the era’s dominant slave trader, operating from his private “slave jail” near Baltimore’s harbor. 

FLEE NORTH: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland was named one of the best ten books of 2023 by Publishers Weekly (“This astonishing and propulsive narrative rights a historical wrong by returning [Thomas] Smallwood to prominence. It’s an absolute must-read”) and one of top 20 by Amazon (“Scott Shane’s narrative account is visceral, a stunning feat of historical storytelling as you’re transported into the terrifying life of an enslaved person in 1800s Baltimore”). Henry Louis Gates Jr. called it “riveting” and Taylor Branch called it “a treasure.”