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

Philip Caputo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2002

The author of A Rumor of War recounts his harrowing tales of life as a foreign correspondent. (SEE QUOTE.)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A frequently riveting memoir of years of living dangerously."
--Kirkus Reviews

From the Back Cover

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. In Means of Eascape, 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. Caputo's palpable descriptions of the captors and fellow cellmates in this razor-thin existence are as compelling as any escape stroy before or since. As he emerged from captivity, Peter Jennings congratulated him on his eventual escape, and on the Pulizer 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 20th century's great conflicts, and even fewer can describe what they saw as well as Philip Caputo does in this important memoir. (6 x 9, 416 pages)Philip Caputo is the author of the New York Times best-seller A Rumor of War 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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: The Lyons Press; 1st edition (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585747378
• ISBN-13: 978-1585747375
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,520,780 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Novelist and journalist Philip Caputo (1941 -- ) was born in Chicago and educated at Purdue and Loyola Universities. After graduating in 1964, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps for three years, including a 16-month tour of duty in Vietnam. He has written 14 books, including two memoirs, four books of general nonfiction, and eight novels. His acclaimed memoir of Vietnam, A Rumor of War, has been published in 15 languages, has sold over 1.5 million copies since its publication in 1977, and is widely regarded as a classic in the literature of war. His most recent novel, Crossers, is set against a backdrop of drug and illegal-immigrant smuggling on the Mexican border and is to be published in the Fall of 2009 by Alfred A. Knopf. In addition to books, Caputo has published dozens of major magazine articles, reviews, and op-ed pieces in publications ranging from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post to Esquire, National Geographic, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Topics included profiles of novelist William Styron and actor Robert Redford, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the turmoil on the Mexican border.

Caputo's professional writing career began in 1968, when he joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune, serving as a general assignment and team investigative reporter until 1972. For the next five years, he was a foreign correspondent for that newspaper, stationed in Rome, Beirut, Saigon, and Moscow. In 1977, he left the paper to devote himself to writing books and magazine articles.


Caputo has won 10 journalistic and literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 (shared for team investigative reporting on vote fraud in Chicago), the Overseas Press Club Award in 1973, the Sidney Hillman Foundation award in 1977 (for A Rumor of War), the Connecticut Book Award in 2006, and the Literary Lights Award in 2007. His first novel, Horn of Africa, was a National Book Award finalist in 1980, and his 2007 essay on illegal immigration won the Blackford Prize for nonfiction from the University of Virginia.

He and his wife, Leslie Ware, an editor for Consumer Reports magazine, divide their time between Connecticut and Arizona. Caputo has two sons from a previous marriage, Geoffrey, a jazz composer and music teacher, and Marc, a political reporter for the Miami Herald.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another solid book from Mr. Caputo. RECOMMENDED, April 16, 2007

By 

DM (ORegon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Means Of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Vietnam (Paperback)

I'm going to post the Publisher Comments and also the Kirkus Reviews here because it will better tell you what this book is about and because there are no other reviews and I'm a lousy reviewer. I've read A Rumor of War (loved), Horn of Africa (loved), Delcorso's Gallery (didn't care for), The Voyage (Loved), Acts of Faith (loved) and of course Means of Escape (Loved)
Mr. Caputo's been through some mighty harrowing experiences in his life as a war correspondent and soldier. I love his writing and his views.


Publisher Comments:
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. In Means of Eascape, 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. Caputo's palpable descriptions of the captors and fellow cellmates in this razor-thin existence are as compelling as any escape stroy before or since. As he emerged from captivity, Peter Jennings congratulated him on his eventual escape, and on the Pulizer 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 20th century's great conflicts, and even fewer can describe what they saw as well as Philip Caputo does in this important memoir. (6 x 9, 416 pages)Philip Caputo is the author of the New York Times best-seller A Rumor of War 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.

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.