Michael J. Totten is an award-winning journalist and prize-winning author whose very first book, The Road to Fatima Gate, won the Washington Institute Book Prize.
He has taken road trips to war zones, sneaked into police states under false pretenses, dodged incoming rocket and mortar fire, stayed in some of the worst hotels ever built anywhere, slipped past the hostile side of a front line, been accused of being a spy, received death threats from terrorists, and been mugged by the cops. When he's not doing or writing about these things, he writes novels.
His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic among numerous other publications, and he's a contributing editor at World Affairs and City Journal. He has reported widely from the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Latin America, and the Balkans. A former resident of Beirut, he lives in Oregon with his wife and two cats.
Prize-winning author and journalist Michael J. Totten’s debut novel features a fictional version of author and journalist Michael J. Totten who is taken from his home in the night by terrorists and hauled bound and gagged to a remote house in the wilderness. So begins a harrowing journey across three states with a ruthless band of killers and sadists.
Prize-winning author Michael J. Totten returns with a masterpiece of travel writing and history in this journey through thirteen nations—all but two formerly communist—just beyond the edge of the West where few casual travelers venture.
Award-winning foreign correspondent Michael J. Totten embeds with U.S. Army soldiers in Baghdad during the Surge. They were sent out as bait to lure an insurgent commander, but instead find themselves stalked in the dark by a shadowy faceless militia.
In this classic riveting dispatch from Iraq, award-winning foreign correspondent Michael J. Totten embeds with a unit of battle-hardened American soldiers as they hunt the elusive terrorist commander Haji Jawad—who wore a suicide vest wherever he went—in the fetid slums of Sadr City, Baghdad, at midnight.
In the Wake of the Surge is a gripping first-person narrative that tells the story of the Kurds, the Arabs, and the Americans in Iraq during one of the most violent and wrenching periods in that country’s history by award-winning foreign correspondent Michael J. Totten, who visited Iraq seven times between 2005 and 2009.
Libya's Moammar Qaddafi ran one of the most terrifying police states in the world before an armed rebel movement tore his repressive regime apart. In the Land of the Brother Leader is award-winning foreign correspondent Michael J. Totten's alterately humorous, creepy, and occasionally touching portrait of a brutalized nation just a few short years before the end of an era.