A RUMOR OF WAR - Softcover

Caputo, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345323572 ISBN 13: 9780345323576

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1984

Synopsis

The extraordinary betseller that provides a close-up look unlike any other, at the American experience in Vietnam. Powerful, vivid, compassionate, and heartbreaking, here is a very personal and yet universal grunt's-eye-view of the hopeless brutality and the ultimate, and seemingly endless horror where men and governments sacrificed their morality and the souls of their nation.

About this title

Review

"A singular and marvellous work – a soldier's-eye account that tells us, as no other book that I can think of has done, what it was actually like to be fighting in this hellish jungle" (New York Times)

"All men who go to war experience a moral as well as a physical odyssey, but few were as dramatic as that of Philip Caputo ... a sensation that was elevated to instant classic status ... I would rate his book much higher than Michael Herr’s celebrated Dispatches ... much of the value of this immensely readable tale of a young man’s murderous follies is that he tells many things that are not peculiar to Vietnam, but embrace the behaviour and feelings – or lack of them – of soldiers on all battlefields" (Max Hastings Sunday Times)

"Unparalleled in its honesty, unapologetic in its candour and singular in its insights into the minds and hearts of men in combat, this book is as powerful to read today as the day it was published in 1977. Caputo has more than earned his place beside Sassoon, Owen, Vonnegut, and Heller" (Kevin Powers)

"To call this the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it. A Rumour of War is a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist that readers asks themselves the questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive? A terrifying book, it will make the strongest among us weep" (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

"Caputo's troubled, searching meditations on the love and the hate of war, on fear and the ambivalent discord warfare can create in the hearts of decent men are amongst the most eloquent I have read in modern literature" (New York Review of Books)

From the Publisher

The definitive book of the Vietnam War - and a classic of war literature to rank alongside All Quiet on the Western Front and The Naked and the Dead.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1984
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345323572
• ISBN 13: 9780345323576
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback