Means of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Vietnam - Softcover

Caputo, Philip

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9781585747375: Means of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Vietnam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1585747378 ISBN 13: 9781585747375

Publisher: The Lyons Press, 2002

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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 and the bloodstained streets of Beirut. 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 held hostage for a week by Islamic extremists while reporting in Beirut. Later, 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. His observations on that war-torn country and its ethos are starkly relevant today. Few authors have put themselves so squarely in the centre of the 20th century's great conflicts, and even fewer can decribe what they saw as well as Philip Caputo does in this memoir.

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Review:

"Recounts his adventures, his near-death experiences, in Vietnam and Lebanon, Israel and Afghanistan, while he was working as a journalist. There are some good yarns to be told, and Mr. Caputo has a fine voice for telling them." - The New York Times Book Review

About the Author:

Philip Caputo is the author of the New York Times best-seller A Rumor of War, In the Shadows of the Morning (see page 116), and three novels: Indian Country, DelCorso's Gallery, and Horn of Africa. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 as part of an investigative team for the Chicago Tribune, and his coverage of his experience as a captive of Palestinian guerrillas won him the Overseas Press Club's George Polk Citation.

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