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On a quiet morning in California, a lone gunman opens fire on a
busload of children headed for a field trip, then turns the gun on
himself. Forensic psychiatrist Leander Heartwood and special agent
Gabriel Chin team up to investigate the case, seeking at first only
to solve this single disturbing crime but in time delving into
issues of race, morality, and the complex forces at work in all
horrifying acts of violence.
Part mystery, part psychological thriller, part piercing social
commentary, Equation for Evil is a riveting and incisive meditation
on violence and the nature of evil.
The first memoir of the Vietnam War and an all-time classic of war
literature |40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION| In March 1965, Marine
Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo landed in Danang with the first ground
combat unit committed to fight in Vietnam. Sixteen months later,
having served on the line in one of modern history's ugliest wars,
he returned home - physically whole but emotionally destroyed, his
youthful idealism shattered. A decade later, having reported
first-hand the very final hours of the war, Caputo sat down to
write 'simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and
the things war does to them'. It is widely regarded as one of the
greatest war memoirs of all time. ____________________ 'A singular
and marvellous work - a soldier's-eye account that tells us, as no
other book that I can think of has done, what it was actually like
to be fighting in this hellish jungle' The New York Times
'Unparalleled in its honesty, unapologetic in its candour and
singular in its insights into the minds and hearts of men in
combat, this book is as powerful to read today as the day it was
published in 1977. Caputo has more than earned his place beside
Sassoon, Owen, Vonnegut, and Heller' Kevin Powers 'To call this the
best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it. A Rumour of War is a
dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist that
readers asks themselves the questions: How would I have acted? To
what lengths would I have gone to survive? A terrifying book, it
will make the strongest among us weep' Los Angeles Times Book
Review 'Caputo's troubled, searching meditations on the love and
the hate of war, on fear and the ambivalent discord warfare can
create in the hearts of decent men are amongst the most eloquent I
have read in modern literature' New York Review of Books 'Superb.
At times it is hard to remember that this is not a novel' New
Statesman
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.
Indian Country""is a sweeping, brave and compassionate story from
one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the Vietnam
experience.
Christian Starkmann follows his boyhood friend, an Ojibwa Indian
called Bonny George, from the wilderness of Michigan's Upper
Peninsula, where they roamed, hunted and fished in their youths, to
the wilderness of Vietnam, where they serve as soldiers in the same
platoon. After returning home from the war, his friend buried on
the battlefield he left behind, Christian begins to make a life for
himself. Yet years later, although he is happily married to June, a
good-hearted social worker, and has two daughters, Christian is
still fighting--with the searing memories of combat, with the
paranoid visions that are clouding his marriage and threatening his
career, and most of all with the ghost of Bonny George, who haunts
his dreams and presses him to come to terms with a secret so
powerful it could destroy everything he has built.
When Vietnam veteran and foreign correspondent Charlie Gage is recruited by the shadowy Thomas Colfax to assist with something called Operation Atropos, he has no idea he is about to be enlisted for guerilla warfare in northeast Africa. Once he realizes he’s a mercenary, however, he is not at all concerned. Ever since his young secretary was killed by a grenade at their bureau office in Beirut a couple of years before, he has lost all volition. Which is why he so readily capitulates not only to Colfax, but also, and more dangerously so, to every command of Jeremy Nordstrand, the mystical megalomaniac determined to achieve greatness on their seemingly suicidal mission. Set in the forsaken yet exotic deserts of Ethiopia, Horn of Africa is a vividly detailed and masterfully plotted novel chronicling a broken man’s struggle for salvation and inner freedom in the midst of a broken nation’s fight for stability and peace.
With Exiles, his first collection of shorter fiction, the author of the universally acclaimed, best-selling memoir A Rumor of War ("It will make the strongest among us weep", wrote John Gregory Dunne) sends the reader on a tripartite adventure.
First to suburban Connecticut, where a young blue-collar man on the way to his mother's funeral falls in with an upper-crust couple who lavish attention on him and pull him into unexpected dilemmas.
Then to Australia's Torres Strait, where a charismatic but troublesome stranger washes ashore into the thick of a struggle for a tiny island's very identity.
Then to Vietnam--vintage Caputo territory--where a squad of misfits plunge deep into the jungle in search of the body of their mess sergeant, who has been carried off by a tiger.
No matter the backdrop, Philip Caputo's ear for the vernacular is unerring, while his interrogation of human nature--of the deceptions we inflict on ourselves and others--is unflinching. Exiles affirms the remarkable range, the freedom from genre, of a writer whose "meditations on the love and hate of war were hailed by William Styron as "among the most eloquent I have read in modern literature.
From the Hardcover edition.
Thirty years ago, Pulitzer Prize--winning author and journalist
Philip Caputo crossed the deserts of Sudan and Eritrea on foot and
camelback, a journey that inspired his first novel, "Horn of
Africa, and awakened a lifelong fascination with Africa. His
travels have since taken him back to Sudan, as well as to Kenya,
Somalia, and Tanzania, and from those experiences he has fashioned
"Acts of Faith, his most ambitious novel. A stunning and timely
epic, it tells the stories of pilots, aid workers, missionaries,
and renegades struggling to relieve the misery wrought by the civil
war in Sudan.
The hearts of these men and women are in the right place, but as
they plunge into a well of moral corruption for which they are
ill-prepared, their hidden flaws conspire with circumstances to
turn their strengths-bravery, compassion, daring, and empathy-into
weaknesses. In pursuit of noble ends, they make ethical
compromises; their altruism curdles into self-righteous zealotry
and greed, entangling them in a web of conspiracies that leads,
finally, to murder. A few, however, escape the moral trap and find
redemption in the discovery that firm convictions can blind the
best-intentioned man or woman to the difference between right and
wrong.
Douglas Braithwaite, an American aviator who flies food and
medicine to Sudan's ravaged south, is torn between his altruism and
powerful personal ambitions. His partners are Fitzhugh Martin, a
multiracial Kenyan who sees Sudan as a cause that can give purpose
to his directionless life, and Wesley Dare, a hard-bitten bush
pilot who is not as cynical as he thinks he is and sacrifices all
for the woman he loves.
They are joined by two strong women: QuinetteHardin, an evangelical
Christian from Iowa who liberates slaves captured by Arab raiders
and who falls in love with a Sudanese rebel; and Diana Briggs, the
daughter of a family with colonial roots in Africa, who believes
that her love for her adopted continent might be enough to save it.
Pitted against them is Ibrahim Idris ibn Nur-el-Din, a fierce Arab
warlord whose obsessive quest for an escaped concubine undermines
his faith in the holy war he is waging against Sudan's southern
blacks.
In a harsh yet alluring landscape, these and other vividly realized
characters act out a drama of modern-day Africa. Grounded in the
reality of today's headlines, "Acts of Faith is a captivating novel
of human complexity that combines seriousness with all the
seductive pleasure of a masterly thriller.
Philip Caputo's passion for travel and adventure was inspired by
the works of Joseph Conrad, Jack London, and Herman Melville, and
through the years this passion led to a rugged writer's life,
filled with hair-raising experiences in the jungles of Vietnam, the
rubble of Beirut, and the savannas of Africa. In the Shadows of the
Morning collects Caputo's essays for the first time, each imbued
with the powerful and memorable writing for which he has become so
well known. In "The Ahab Complex," Caputo recalls a life-and-death
struggle off the coast of Florida with a majestic giant blue marlin
whose quarter-ton body "lit up as if a gigantic light had flashed
in the water." He recounts his travels in Kenya's largest national
park among the only lions to have a natural tendency to stalk and
eat human beings, and where the accounts of their gruesome
escapades invaded his dreams. In "The Last of the Big Open," he
reflects on a harrowing trip down the Alaskan river that nearly
claimed his son's life, nature's indifference to human loss, and an
evocative account of letting go. In the Shadows of the Morning is a
fascinating journey through a lifetime of profound experiences.
Adventurers and lovers of great writing will welcome this
collection of finely crafted essays by one of America's most gifted
writers. (6 x 9 1/4, 288 pages) Philip Caputo is a Pulitzer Prize
winner and author of several critically acclaimed novels and works
of nonfiction, including Delcorso's Gallery, Exiles, The Voyage,
Means of Escape, Indian Country, Equation for Evil, and the
national best-seller A Rumor of War, praised as the most accurate
portrayal of combat yet written. He lives in Connecticut.
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