Means of Escape (Paperback)

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 PulitzerPrize 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.