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Caputo, Philip ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
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MEANS OF ESCAPE: A WAR CORRESPONDENT'S MEMOIR OF LIFE AND DEATH IN AFGHANISTAN, THE MIDDLE EAST, AND VIETNAM
Caputo, Philip
2002 6429 ABOUT THE BOOK Means of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Vietnam FROM THE PUBLISHER Philip Caputo has been a witness to the most important struggles of our time, from the hot green hell of Vietnam to the dusty mountains of Afghanistan to the bloodstained streets of Beirut. In Means of Escape, Caputo intersperses imaginative retellings of events he witnessed with true accounts of how he became a writer, and what happened when he was sent to some of the most dangerous places in the world. He begins with his childhood and budding career in Chicago. Soon after, he was deep in the Sinai Peninsula searching for the last authentic Bedouin, and reporting from the front lines of the Yom Kippur War. In an eerie parallel to journalist Daniel Pearl's tragic murder, Caputo was kidnapped and held hostage by Islamic extremists while reporting in Beirut. Caputo's palpable descriptions of the captors and fellow cellmates in this razor-thin existence are as compelling as any escape story before or since. As he emerged from captivity, Peter Jennings congratulated him on his eventual escape, and on the Pulitzer Prize he'd won while imprisoned. While continuing his work as a reporter in Beirut, he was singled out by a sniper and received a bullet in his ankle and a chunk of wall in his head. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, he joined the Mujahideen for a clandestine mission and was nearly captured by Soviet forces. Few authors have put themselves so squarely in the center of the twentieth century's great conflicts, and even fewer can describe what they saw as well as Philip Caputo in this important memoir. FROM THE CRITICS Kirkus Reviews An intensely personal, albeit consistently affecting and frequently riveting memoir of years of living dangerously. Caputo (A Rumor of War, Indian Country, etc.) has witnessed much of the worst violence that marked the latter half of the 20th century. A combat veteran of Vietnam, he went on to cover trouble spots throughout the Third World as a roving correspondent for The Chicago Tribune. Describing himself as drawn to history (if not to the sound of the guns), the globe-trotting author has reported on insurgency in Eritrea, civil strife in Lebanon, Israel's October War, the fall of Saigon, and a host of lesser belligerencies. Looking for a "good war" several years after having quit the journalism trade, Caputo accepted an assignment from Esquire that took him deep behind Soviet lines in Afghanistan. Venturesome to the point of rashness, he has paid the price of boldness on many occasions. Though he made it through Vietnam without a physical scratch, for example, the author was imprisoned by Palestinian guerrillas in Beirut and later sustained severe wounds (at the hands of Christian militia) in the same city, leaving him with a still-painful limp. Peacefully settled in one place now, he's content to let a workroom window overlooking a salt marsh on the Long Island Sound serve as his new means of escape. Caputo nonetheless looks back on his days as a rolling stone with some relish and few apparent regrets. Indeed, he retains a rueful sense of barracks humor neatly summarized in an ultrarude anecdote whose moral is: "the final indignity is that there is no final indignity." An episodic, impressionistic, and dead-honest narrative that affords memorable as well as consequentialinsights into a chaotic era's noteworthy conflicts. Lyons Press, The 1-58574-737-8 / 9781585747375
Paperback As New
Price:
15.75 USD
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