Synopsis
Focuses on the author's experiences in some of the world's most punishing war zones, from Beirut to Saigon to Afghanistan, and portrays the horrors of modern war through the eyes of a foreign correspondent
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 consequential insights into a chaotic era's noteworthy conflicts. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
This is, make no mistake about it, a startlingly honest and brutal book. It deals with the age-old folly of war and its strange companion, the love of war, which is a siren call to newsmen like Caputo who must report on war. Even after he was wounded in the senseless fighting in Beirut, even after he had escaped death in the fall of Saigon, even after he had gained a meaure of fame and fortune with his bestselling A Rumor of War ( LJ 5/15/77), Caputo found himself drawn again to the terrors of war in Afghanistan, where tribesmen fought Russian high-tech gunships with Victorian-era Enfield rifles. At one point he concludes: "The last good war had been the one between Michael and Lucifer, and that only because angels and devils do not bleed." The writing is suberb. Highly recommended for all.
- Chet Hagan, Berks Cty. P.L. System, Pa.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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