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Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa Hardcover – July 25, 2003
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But the drama in Capa's life wasn't limited to one side of the lens. Born in Budapest as Andre Freidman, Capa fled political repression and anti-Semitism as a teenager by escaping to Berlin, where he first picked up a Leica and then witnessed the rise of Hitler. By the time his images of D-Day appeared in Life Magazine, he had become a legend, the first photographer to make his calling appear glamorous and sexy, and the model for many of the most intrepid photographers to this day. In 1947, after a decade covering war, he founded a cooperative agency-Magnum-and in the process revolutionized the industry. For the first time, photographers would retain their own copyrights and negatives, and nearly half a century later, Magnum remains the most prestigious agency of its kind.
By the time he died, at just forty-one in 1954, Capa was not only the greatest adventurer in photographic history. He had become a colleague and confidant to writers Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway and director John Huston, and a seducer of several of his era's most alluring icons, including Ingrid Bergman.
From Budapest in the twenties to Paris in the thirties, from post-war Hollywood to Stalin's Russia, and from New York in the fifties to Indochina, Blood and Champagne is a wonderfully evocative account of Capa's life and times. Based on extensive interviews with Capa's friends and contemporaries, as well as FBI and Soviet files and other previously unpublished materials, Alex Kershaw's biography is every bit as compelling as its charismatic subject.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherThomas Dunne Books
- Publication dateJuly 25, 2003
- Dimensions6.4 x 1.19 x 9.68 inches
- ISBN-100312315643
- ISBN-13978-0312315641
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Review
"Ambition, integrity and courage were intertwined in Capa, as Alex Kershaw persuades in this elegant biography ...a spellbinding portrait of his gypsy life." --Christopher Sylvester, Sunday Times (UK)
"A fine read, full of high emotion like watching Casablanca for the first time. A tale rich with intrigue, love, lust, lies and betrayal...I loved this book." --Janine di Giovanni, Literary Review (UK)
"This new biography has many of the ingredients of an adventure story." --Martin Gayford, Sunday Telegraph (UK)
"Remarkably fine." --Justine Picardie, Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Packed with good stories, and snappily written, Blood and Champagne is as full of life as the man it celebrates." --Observer (UK)
"Packed with good stories, and snappily written, Blood and Champagne is as full of life as the man it celebrates." (Observer (UK))
From the Inside Flap
"Ambition, integrity and courage were intertwined in Capa, as Alex Kershaw persuades in this elegant biography ...a spellbinding portrait of his gypsy life."
-Christopher Sylvester, Sunday Times (UK)
"A fine read, full of high emotion like watching Casablanca for the first time. A tale rich with intrigue, love, lust, lies and betrayal...I loved this book."
-Janine di Giovanni, Literary Review (UK)
"This new biography has many of the ingredients of an adventure story."
-Martin Gayford, Sunday Telegraph (UK)
"Remarkably fine."
-Justine Picardie, Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Packed with good stories, and snappily written, Blood and Champagne is as full of life as the man it celebrates."
-Observer (UK)
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (July 25, 2003)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0312315643
- ISBN-13 : 978-0312315641
- Item Weight : 1.32 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.4 x 1.19 x 9.68 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,506,391 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,707 in Artist & Architect Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Alex Kershaw is a journalist, public speaker and New York Times best-selling author of ten books, including The Liberator - the basis for the Netflix series - The Longest Winter, The Bedford Boys, Avenue of Spies and The First Wave. His next book, Against All Odds, a saga of four Medal of Honor recipients, will be released in May 2022.
Please visit www.alexkershaw.com for more information.
You can also catch up with him and his work on Facebook - BattlesofWW2; Instagram - AlexKershawAuthor; and Twitter - Kershaw_Alex
He blogs at www.alexkershawauthor.com.
PRAISE FOR THE FIRST WAVE
“[A] fast paced tale… Kershaw is at his evocative best describing the chaos, courage, and carnage of combat, vividly portraying the bravery of the ‘greatest generation.’ Even readers well-read on the subject will enjoy this perspective.”—Publishers Weekly
“A masterful retelling of the most dramatic day of World War II—the Allied landings on the beaches of France. In Alex Kershaw’s expert hands, readers will feel the sting of the cold surf, smell the acrid cordite that hung in the air, and duck the zing of machine gun bullets whizzing overhead. The First Wave is an absolute triumph.”—James M. Scott, Pulitzer Prize Finalist and national bestselling author of Target Tokyo and Rampage
“Master storyteller Alex Kershaw brings the key Allied players of D-Day to life once more. He vividly portrays their exploits—Rangers at Pointe du Hoc, French Commandos at Ouistreham, American paratroopers on the Cotentin, and assault troops who hit the Normandy beaches. These pages ooze with the unforgettable human drama of history’s most consequential invasion. Read them and you might even feel as though you were there.”—John C. McManus, author of The Dead and Those About to Die: D-Day—The Big Red One at Omaha Beach
“Meet the assaulters: Pathfinders plunging from the black, coxswains plowing the whitecaps, bareknuckle Rangers scaling sheer rock. Will they secure the landing zone? Wrest the beachhead? Or will that last bridge blow up in their faces? Even if we know how D-Day ends, The First Wave grips with all the power of a first read. Fast-paced and up-close, this is history’s greatest story reinvigorated as only Alex Kershaw can.”—Adam Makos, New York Times bestselling author of Spearhead and A Higher Call
“Alex Kershaw brilliantly brings a new perspective to one of the seminal events of WWII. The First Wave is an awe-inspiring and important book that portrays the blood on the risers, from Captain Frank Lillyman’s airborne pathfinders to Lieutenant George Kerchner’s Rangers and their remarkable assault on the cliffs of Pointe Du Hoc. The sights, sounds, and fury of D-Day are vividly captured in Kershaw’s virtuoso narrative.”—Patrick K. O’Donnell, author of The Unknowns: The Untold Story of America’s Unknown Soldier and WWI’s Most Decorated Who Brought Him Home
“The First Wave is Alex Kershaw’s stirring tribute to the warriors who successfully carried out the largest and most difficult military operations in history 75 years ago. One of the US First Infantry Division NCO’s who survived that desperate day in Normandy later said, ‘You can’t buy valor and you can’t pull heroes off an assembly line.’ Kershaw’s superb account of D-Day and beyond is the story of their amazing courage under fire and how men ranging from a lord of the realm to the humble son of a president answered the call and began the liberation of occupied Europe from Nazi tyranny.”—Carlo D’Este, author of Decision in Normandy and Patton: A Genius for War
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We learn about Capa's breakneck life. We learn about his great points and not so great points, which almost "everyone" forgave him for. He lived life for himself --drinking, sleeping around and making himself into a famous war photographer simultaneously. How he did this, formed a long lasting business and charmed the ladies ( including Ingrid Bergman) is the subject of this biography that uncovers the horrors of war while not being totally depressing. This is a credit to the biographer, Kershaw, and to Capa--a man's man and, actually, a nice guy.
Capa could never reconcile the mutually exclusive, always conflicting elements of his character, and it was this constant battle within himself that drove him to seek out the world’s hottest trouble spots, and document them, instead of securing less dangerous and more remunerative steady employment; impelled him to have numerous liaisons rather than settling down with the “love of his life” (and there were several of those); and caused him to gamble away on numerous occasions the very money he had earned by risking his life. To use an analogy from science fiction, it was as though he was the Starship Enterprise, driven on at Warp Factor 9 by the mutual annihilation of matter and antimatter. Capa often declared himself weary of seeing so much death and destruction even as he continued to seek it out.
Whatever the complex mixture of motivations that drove him onward, his photographic legacy is justly famous and unquestionable. He took the most famous photo to emerge from the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the best known photos from D-Day (he was the only journalist who went ashore with the first wave on Omaha Beach; many images from the Arab-Israeli War of 1948; and of course the Indo-China War. Had he lived, he probably would have wanted to be at Suez in 1956, the Lebanon crisis of 1958, the Bay of Pigs, and of course in Vietnam. Those photos will be his enduring legacy.
**** review by Chuck Graham *****
Top reviews from other countries
Capa felt obligated to photograph wars and conflicts. Although never a trained soldier, he had an awareness of danger that he may have absorbed by working alongside military personnel and which seemed to serve him well as he had escaped several conflicts without serious injury. He caused his own death in a moment of inattention by tripping a landmine in VietNam. His photographs were originally often published in magazines and syndicated worldwide although later reprinted in several books, some written by Capa himself. He set the target for those who followed in his path.
There are few Capa biographies and many more books about his photography. As a biography, this appears to reach beyond most others. It is a moderately sizeable book and is lightly illustrated (its imagery is printed on rough paper in common with its text pages). It pre-dates the finding in 2007 of 'The Mexican Suitcase', a long-lost and presumed destroyed collection of Capa's original negatives which disappeared at about the end of WW2. The suitcase was important not just for those negatives but because it also unexpectedly contained most of those taken by his former muse and lover, Gerda Taro, and some of Capa's wartime notebooks. Examining its contents was able to show that some photos previously attributed to Capa were actually the work of Taro. Had the suitcase been sooner found, or this book later written, it may have been slightly different.
As a biography of Capa, it is perhaps the best of those that pre-date the 'Suitcase'; others may yet be written because of it. It is informative and provides a valuable insight into the man and just what it was that drove him to undertake his life work. It also includes some of his more controversial activities, especially his romantic interludes with a Hollywood star with whom he once contemplated marriage.
There are explanatory notes scattered throughout the book at the bottom of most of its pages. A Bibliography lists a great many books that cover in part or whole Capa or his work, the wars in which he worked and anything else of relevance. However, as this book was originally published in 2002 (2003 in USA), even the most recent will probably now be out of print and not readily available. There is also a substantive Index.
By general concensus, this is regarded as the definitive Capa biography.
It seems that war followed him all his life or that he followed war all his life. An exceptional man and life, far too short, dying at the fall of Dien Bien Phu in Indochina at the age of 41 in 1954. Short life though so full of experiences, meeting with icon of his era, a womanizer, alway with a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. Full but very dramatic life, finding the love of his life, also a war reporter named 'The Little Red Fox'Gerda Taro, married for 7 years when she died taking photographs. I feel that CAPA never really recovered from the love of his live as ruthless and daring as he was.
'Blood and Champage is a wonderful biography, well worth reading.
Being middle age, I have known his work and admired his black and white shots for many years.
His life was I would say rather dramatic as he went along as a journalist covering endless wars, himself having to leave Budapest in 1913 when political repression and anti-semitism attacked Hungary, going to Berlin when he witnessed the rize of Hitler and so he went on with his coverage of many other wars.
I would strongly recommend anyone to read about CAPA, to look at his work of excellence.
Wathever age I feel this is a very rich, informative, sad and informative very good read.







