Caputo, Philip

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Philip Caputo

Personal

Born June 10, 1941, in Chicago, IL; son of Joseph (a plant manager) and Marie Ylonda (Napolitan) Caputo; married Jill Esther Ongemach (a librarian), June 21, 1969 (divorced, 1982); married Marcelle Lynn Besse, October 30, 1982 (divorced, 1985); married Leslie Blanchard Ware, June 4, 1988; children: (first marriage) Geoffrey Jacob, Marc Antony. Education: Attended Purdue University; Loyola University, B.A., 1964. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Deep sea and fly fishing.

Addresses

Agent—Aaron Priest Literary Agency, 122 East 42nd St., New York, NY 10168.

Career

Author, journalist, and screenwriter. 3-M Corp., Chicago, IL, promotional writer and member of staff of house newspaper, 1968-69; Chicago Tribune, Chicago, local correspondent, 1969-72, foreign correspondent in Rome, Beirut, Saigon, and Moscow, 1972-77; freelance writer, 1977—. Mercury-Douglas Productions, Paramount Pictures, screenwriter, 1987—. Military service: U.S. Marine Corps, 1964-67, served in Vietnam; became lieutenant.

Member

PEN, Authors Guild, Authors League of America, National Writers Union, Writers Guild of America.

Awards, Honors

Pulitzer Prize (with George Bliss), 1973, for coverage of primary election fraud; George Polk Award, 1973; also received Illinois Associated Press Award, Illinois United Press Award, Green Gavel Award from American Bar Association, Overseas Press Club Award, and Sidney Hillman Award.

Writings

A Rumor of War (memoir), Holt (New York, NY), 1977, published as A Rumor of War: With a Twentieth-Anniversary Postscript by the Author, 1996.

Horn of Africa (novel), Holt (New York, NY), 1980. DelCorso's Gallery (novel), Holt (New York, NY), 1983.

Indian Country: A Novel, Bantam (New York, NY), 1987.

Means of Escape (memoir), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1991.

Equation for Evil (novel), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1996.

Exiles: Three Short Novels, Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.

The Voyage (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.

Ghosts of Tsavo: Stalking the Mystery Lions of East Africa (nonfiction), National Geographic Adventure Press (Washington, DC), 2002.

In the Shadows of the Morning: Essays on Wild Lands,Wild Waters, and a Few Untamed People (nonfiction), Lyons Press (Guilford, CT), 2002.

Contributor to magazines and newspapers, including Esquire, National Geographic Adventure, and National Geographic.

Work in Progress

An epic novel set in contemporary Africa.

Sidelights

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Caputo is, according to Gloria Emerson, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "a splendid, muscular storyteller." Booklist's Donna Seaman similarly called him "a superb yarn spinner with a love of adventure and a penchant for philosophizing." Equally proficient in journalism, memoirs, and best-selling fiction, Caputo has used personal experience in most of his works. A young Marine lieutenant in the 1960s, he served in Vietnam for sixteen months at the outset of that war. He turned these experiences into A Rumor of War, "the finest memoir of men at arms in our generation," as Peter Andrews observed in the New York Times Book Review. A foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Rome, Beirut, Saigon, and Moscow during the 1970s, he further mined personal happenings for his memoir Means of Escape, and for a pair of novels, Horn of Africa and DelCorso's Gallery. Other fictional forays feature the travails of a returning Vietnam vet in Indian Country, an investigation of racial violence in Equation for Evil, an exploration of displacement in Exiles: Three Short Novels, and an account of adventures on the high seas in The Voyage. The ever-inventive Caputo turned to the natural world for two nonfiction titles published in 2002, In the Shadows of the Morning: Essays on Wild Lands, Wild Waters, and a Few Untamed People, and Ghosts of Tsavo: Stalking the Mystery Lions of East Africa. In all these works, and especially the novels, Caputo keeps the reader "entertained as well as provoked," as Booklist's Brad Hooper noted.

Seeking Adventure

Born in Chicago in 1941, Caputo was raised on the outskirts of that city and attended Purdue University as an engineering student in 1959. As the author told Robert Dahlin in a Publishers Weekly interview, "My father wanted me to go into engineering. . . . I lasted only three semesters." Thereafter he "bummed around" for a year trying to find himself. He worked as a brakeman on the railroad and then finally decided he would try college again. He went to Loyola University, where high grades on the English assessment exams convinced Caputo that he should major in that subject. In high school he had written short stories and some poetry, and at Loyola he began writing again. In his senior year he made a snap decision that changed his life.

It was 1964 and the situation in Vietnam was heating up; recruiters were making the rounds of college campuses in search of recruits for what was then an all-volunteer military. Two Marine recruiters showed up at Loyola. "They were utterly resplendent in their dress blues and I joined up," Caputo told Dahlin. "I wanted to go off and do something adventurous and dangerous." Caputo became a Marine lieutenant and got far more danger and adventure than he had expected. From his first days in Vietnam, he began to see that his prior vision of the world had been simplistic and naive. War was not a glamorous adventure, but an ugly, brutal struggle. Nothing about Vietnam was the way he had imagined. The enemy proved to be elusive; the terrain and climate, while seeming to be so exotic and beautiful at first, became a version of hell on earth for soldiers lugging heavy packs and weapons. There were no real victories in this strange variation on war, Caputo came to understand. He soon discovered how war dehumanizes all those who are a part of it, how it releases the evil that is in all men. As he later wrote in A Rumor of War: "Scorched by the sun, wracked by the wind and rain of the monsoon, fighting in alien swamps and jungles, our humanity rubbed off of us as the protective blueing rubbed off the barrels of our rifles.

"I saw over there a kind of moral evil that lurks in people," Caputo told Dahlin. "I saw it in myself too, and not just as an abstraction. It affected my

imagination, my way of looking at the world. I realized how stupid I'd been about people." One incident in particular affected Caputo. While tracking down suspected enemy soldiers, or Vietcong, some men under Caputo's command killed two innocent South Vietnamese boys. A murder charge hung over the men and Caputo for several months. Though ultimately the charge was dropped, Caputo could not escape the sense of guilt at the deaths of those two young boys.

After serving for sixteen months in Vietnam, Caputo returned to the United States. He finished his time with the Marines by training other young men at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. His tour of duty in Vietnam had made Caputo anti-war, but he did not fit into the typical anti-war camp. He did not see himself as a liberal; rather his experiences had made him more conservative in a literal way, giving him a deeply pessimistic outlook on man's potential for evil. "It is only through law and civilization that we keep from running amok," he noted to Dahlin. At Camp Lejeune Caputo helped pass the time by writing about his experiences in Vietnam. He began this work as a novel in 1967. After his discharge from the Marines, Caputo traveled to Europe, where he tried to finish his novel and make some larger sense out of his experiences. But by the late 1960s the novel remained unfinished. He returned to the United States and found work as a local reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

From Journalist to Author

After serving a journalistic apprenticeship on local stories, Caputo earned a posting as foreign correspondent in 1972, traveling between Rome, the Middle East, Saigon, and Moscow. In 1973 he was taken hostage in Beirut by one of the warring sides in Lebanon's civil war. Finally released, he learned belatedly that he and other reporters on the Chicago Tribune who had written about election fraud in Chicago had won the Pulitzer Prize. Back in Rome, Caputo began putting his Vietnam manuscript in order, using a three-part organization inspired by The Inferno by Dante Alighieri. It was then that Caputo saw that his story would actually work best as a memoir rather than a novel. With about seventy pages completed, he found an agent, Aaron Priest, who liked the work, but who also knew it would be a difficult sale in an America tired of all news about the Vietnam War. In Beirut in 1974, Caputo was shot several times in the right foot and left ankle by Muslim militiamen and shipped back to the United States for treatment. It was while he was still in the hospital that he learned his first book had sold. Taking a nine-month leave from the Chicago Tribune, he completed the manuscript of A Rumor of War. He was in Moscow for the Tribune in 1977 when the memoir was published and was happily surprised when it became a bestseller.

In the memoir Caputo recounts his change from an eager and fresh Marine recruit into what he felt was a callous killer, and then into a soldier who had grown fed up and disgusted with the absurdity of the war. Arriving in Vietnam expecting a war lasting only months, he was quickly disabused of such notions, finding it a war of attrition in which the U.S. forces were looked upon by most of the people as invaders, not liberators. Caputo laid bare his own failings and those of other soldiers in his book, recounting the incident of the two innocent South Vietnamese boys killed by his men. Reviewers gave high praise to Caputo's debut book. In his review of A Rumor of War, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times called the book "singular and marvelous," one that "tells us, as no other book that I can think of has done, what it was actually like to be fighting in that hellish jungle." Theodore Solotaroff, writing in the New York Times Book Review, also found that Caputo accurately captured the horrors of battle as felt by the foot soldier, further noting that the author placed his involvement in a larger context, questioning the whole American effort in Vietnam. "For the ultimate effect of this book," Solotaroff wrote, "is to make the personal and public responsibility merge into a nightmare of horror and waste experienced humanly by the Caputos and inhumanly by the politicians and generals. Out of the force of his obsession with the war and his role in it, Caputo has revealed the broken idealism and suppressed agony of America's involvement."

The success of A Rumor of War allowed Caputo to quit his job as foreign correspondent in 1977 and turn to writing novels. He had discovered in the writing of his memoir that nonfiction "wasn't supple enough," as he explained to Dahlin. "I was so trained in journalism. I was too much a who-what-where kind of guy. Only in fiction could I explore what I wanted at greater depth." Speaking with Phil Dekane in an interview for Red Cedar Review Online, Caputo explained that journalism "is a good way for the aspiring novelist or short-story writer to learn his or her craft—provided he or she doesn't stay in it too long. It teaches brevity, clarity, an accuracy in the use of language, and it certainly teaches you about life. Its downside is that it requires you to tell rather than show stories, and with its emphasis on immediacy it attenuates your memory. That's why no would-be fiction writer should stay in it for longer than, say, three to five years."

The Novelist

Caputo turned to underlying themes explored in A Rumor of War for his works of fiction. Perhaps the strongest of these themes is, as Caputo has put it, the human struggle "to navigate through ethical wastelands stripped bare of landmarks that guide human actions." His first novel, Horn of Africa, is a story of political and personal corruption that draws from Caputo's experiences as a reporter covering the civil war in Ethiopia. The novel follows a trio of maladjusted soldiers-of-fortune as they attempt to deliver CIA-provided weapons to Muslim rebels in the desert wastelands of Africa's Horn. The team, comprised of American Vietnam veteran Charles Gage and ex-British officer Moody, and led by a brutish, obsessive, Nietzsche-quoting warrior named Norstrand, meets with ruin in its efforts to carry out the ill-fated, poorly designed plan. Critics lauded Caputo's efforts as a first-time novelist. The New York Times Book Review's Peter Andrews called Horn of Africa "the genuine article: a real novel stuffed with excitement and filled with sharply drawn characters." A critic in Publishers Weekly found that "this first novel is a brutally vibrant, arresting achievement." Writing in Library Journal, Robert H. Donahugh found Caputo's Norstrand to be "one of the most fascinating characters in modern American fiction."

Caputo continued to examine war's destructive yet hypnotic pull in his second novel, DelCorso's Gallery, set in Vietnam and Lebanon. The book recounts photojournalist Nicholas DelCorso's decision to leave his marriage and career to enter the world of modern warfare, a world he knew as a Vietnam combat soldier and "the only reality he truly understands," as Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Elaine Kendall observed. Once returned to that reality, amid the despair of Saigon and the savagery of Beirut, DelCorso fights against his mentor and now chief rival, P. X. Dunlop. Their feud builds over opposing ideologies about war and conflicting views about their roles as war photographers. While Dunlop seeks to glorify combat through his battlefield photos, DelCorso's goal, wrote Joe Klein in the New York Times Book Review, is to "show the public the true face of war. It has become an obsession with him . . . a crusade."

Kendall went on to note the portrayals of both men to be accurate and telling, but she observed that the characters and their relationships only serve as a vehicle for the book's true purpose and source of strength—its ability to ask questions about war's existence and its attempts "to answer such urgent questions." Washington Post Book World reviewer Howard Chapnick had a similar opinion, adding that DelCorso's Gallery sheds light on "some of the philosophic questions of journalistic practice and the public's right to know." He concluded, "Caputo has written a tough, painful and provocative book that will cause introspection in the journalistic community."

Mixes Nonfiction and Fiction

Throughout his career, Caputo has continued to alternate between fiction and nonfiction, and with his 1991 book, Means of Escape, he returned to memoir to detail his life as a foreign correspondent. The book was described by the author as an "imaginative autobiography . . . a marriage of memory and imagination," an admission that raised questions of accuracy and authenticity with some critics. Reviewing Means of Escape in Chicago's Tribune Books, Harrison E. Salisbury argued that Caputo "has taken the liberty of rearranging facts, thoughts and episodes to suit what he calls 'creative hindsight'. . . . The reader cannot help asking himself again and again: Did this really happen, or is this what Caputo imagines might have happened?" Morley Safer, writing in the New York Times Book Review, observed that "there are some good yarns to be told. . . . But whose voice is it? Is it the memoirist speaking or the character he has created?" Yet even those critics who questioned Caputo's approach admired his style. Salisbury, for example, described several passages as "pure Caputo, terse, rich in closely observed detail, sharply etched, ironic, tragic." "Caputo's memoir," wrote William Broyles, Jr., in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "is far more than one man's journeys into the dark regions of our times; it is, through him, an American journey from abundance and promise, through defeat and disillusionment, to a kind of peace." For Edwin T. Arnold, writing in Magill Book Reviews, what Caputo created with his book was "a powerful, compelling account of global madness in the last part of the century."

Caputo again turned to fiction with his third novel, Indian Country. Here he took on the plight of troubled Vietnam veterans. The title has a dual meaning: on one level it refers to the book's setting, Ojibwa territory in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and on another level to what Caputo describes in the novel as "a place, condition or circumstance that is alien and dangerous." An examination of the emotional and psychological deterioration of combat veteran Christian Starkman, Indian Country details Starkman's lapses into states of depression, isolation, and paranoia. Familiar surroundings take on "alien and dangerous" characteristics. Haunted by guilt over the death of his boyhood friend and combat partner, Bonny George, a death he caused by an error in battlefield judgment, Starkman "implodes into delayed disintegration," according to Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Dick Roraback. His character retreats further and further from reality until an old Ojibwa medicine man, the grandfather of Bonny George, offers him a chance for redemption and healing.

Many critics commented that the idea of healing was central to Caputo's narrative. "Caputo . . . grabs the threads he has scattered about . . . and wraps up the whole story magnificently, concluding on a message of hope," wrote Washington Post Book World reviewer John Byrne Cooke. Roraback summarized the work as "a story of forgiveness, ostensibly the forgiveness of Starkman by Bonny George's grandfather; in reality, the forgiveness that must come from within." Finally, New York Times Book Review contributor Frank Conroy found that the work successfully illustrates the pain felt by many Vietnam veterans. He stated: "Indian Country is a fine traditional novel that handles a difficult theme both cleverly and artfully . . . it has real strength."

At times Caputo has effectively turned his journalism into fiction, as shown with his 1996 novel, Equation for Evil. In 1989 Caputo was sent on assignment by Esquire magazine to cover a school shooting in Stockton, California. A psychopath had opened fire on children, killing five, wounding twenty-nine, and then killing himself. Over the years, Caputo began to process this information as a possible novel. This long gestation resulted in Equation for Evil, in which the author focuses on a different type of war—the war waged against society by terrorists and racists. After a white supremacist gunman named Duane Boggs murders a busload of fourteen Asian American children before turning his gun

upon himself, California-based police detective Gabriel Chin and psychiatrist Leander Heartwood must attempt to enter the consciousness of the dead killer in order to track down Boggs's accomplice.

Equation for Evil "stakes out new territory," according to Chicago's Tribune Books contributor James McManus, "but it is also a book in which the legacy of the war in Southeast Asia casts a grim shadow over America well into the 1990s. It forcefully portrays Cambodian refugees, many of whom have survived both the Khmer Rouge and coffin ships crossing the Pacific only to see their children and grandchildren killing each other in gang wars or becoming the targets of racial animosity in California's San Joaquin Valley." While the investigation of Boggs's terrorist act proves an engrossing read in its own right, it also "provides Caputo with the opportunity to paint a very clear and lucid picture of the horrors we have come to in this country, the rampant ethnic hatreds and the avalanche of vulgarity and cruelty that overwhelms our daily lives," according to Washington Post Book World contributor Richard Bausch. "Caputo takes on most of the hot-button issues of our time—racism, random violence, disempowerment, the decay of the social fabric, even the nature of evil itself—and, I am happy to report, more than lives to tell the tale," observed Roger L. Simon, reviewing Equation for Evil in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Further praise came from a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, who felt that Caputo's characters were "complex and compelling," and that his "storytelling is first-rate, with several clever plot surprises and a strong, suspenseful narrative."

From Connecticut to Darkest Africa

Caputo experiments with the novella form in Exiles, a collection of three novellas which offers "a range of settings and contexts" while displaying "consistently precise and atmospheric storytelling," according to Booklist's Brad Hooper. The first and "most satisfying" story, Hooper felt, is "Standing In," about a young man who becomes the surrogate for a son lost in the Gulf War. In "Paradise" a mysterious stranger washes up on a Pacific Island, and with "In the Forest of the Laughing Elephant," Caputo follows the adventures of an American squad of soldiers during the Vietnam war who are tracking a tiger that carried off their mess sergeant. For a contributor for Publishers Weekly, these tales serve up their meanings in "beautifully rendered detail rather than any stylistic or thematic innovation." Similarly, David W. Henderson thought that "the sense of place and fragility of the human psyche are both powerfully evoked" in this group of long stories. Gloria Emerson, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, found that the "great theme in these novels is powerlessness. Desperate men, each facing a different struggle, lack the same power to choose. Caputo reminds us how, although we tend to assume that such men always possess power and control, they do not, except on those occasions when they use a weapon to have their way."

The Voyage, Caputo's eighth book and sixth novel, marks a new direction in Caputo's fiction. Full of action like his other tales, The Voyage is set in the summer of 1901 and is almost a Gothic mystery. Inspired by an actual story in his wife's family, the novel tells of three adolescent sons of wealthy Maine fisherman Cyrus Braithwaite, who are sent on a summer-long sea voyage from Maine to Cuba. En route the sons try to figure out the reasons for this voyage. They also become involved in a homicide and ultimately have to be rescued through diplomatic means. The book takes place partly in the present day as a descendant of Braithwaite, Sibyl, tries to piece together the motivation for this voyage. Finally Sibyl is able to discover the real motives of Cyrus and her discovery reveals a dark family secret. While researching this story, Caputo took up life on the sea, learning firsthand what it feels like to work a small sailing ship on the open ocean. Hooper, writing in Booklist, praised Caputo as a "conjurer of rich atmosphere" in this novel peopled by "finely shaded characters." Similarly, Library Journal's David W. Henderson called The Voyage a "compelling novel," while a reviewer for Publishers Weekly felt that readers "will appreciate Caputo's meticulous research and his Conradian vision of America's past." Andrea Barrett, writing in the New York Times Book Review also observed that the "spirit of Joseph Conrad [is] evoked . . . in everything from the characters to a horror-struck description of a death." However, continuing in the Conradian vein, Barrett concluded that "Sibyl is no Marlow [a character employed by Conrad as a narrator]; her insight sometimes fails and with it the reader's interest." Despite this fault, Barrett concluded that the "voyage [Sybil] renders is full of energy and passion." Michael Frank, however, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, was less laudatory. Frank felt that the book was "architecturally complex" and "thematically complex," but in the final analysis he found it "swollen and disappointing."

Nonfiction has taken center stage in two titles from Caputo in the new millennium. With Ghosts of Tsavo, Caputo recounts the scientific debate over a species of maneless African lion. Two of these animals killed and ate more than one hundred Indian and African railway workers in 1898 in East Africa. They were subsequently hunted down and killed, an episode that was recounted in a book not long after the event and in a movie from 1996, The Ghost and the Darkness. Caputo's book, based on his travels with competing camps of scientists, examines whether or not these lions have lost their manes through environmental causes or if they are in fact a missing link in the development of lion species. Though he comes to no conclusions in the book, he does "excel at evoking the beauty of his surroundings and describing his own sometimes harrowing encounters with wildlife," according to Booklist's Donna Seaman. Further praise came from a Publishers Weekly contributor who called Ghosts of Tsavo "an engrossing book that mixes high-quality travel writing with an intriguing mystery and an in-depth look at the scientific process that tries to grapple with it." Other reviewers were less enthusiastic, however. Library Journal's Wilda Williams found Ghosts of Tsavo a "frustrating mix of personal travel narrative and scientific speculations." Similarly, John Balzar, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, thought the book was a "long slog between watering holes." For Stephen Mihm, reviewing the same title in the Washington Post Book World, there was more to like. "At times the narrative wobbles a bit," Mihm commented, "with Caputo straining to tie it all together. But his skills as a raconteur, his amusing asides and his quick character sketches keep the whole thing rolling along, as do the lions themselves." Likewise, Book's Eric Wargo concluded that "Caputo manages to stir the embers of our primal fears."

With his second 2002 title, In the Shadows of the Morning, Caputo presents previously published essays about life on the wild side: his experiences in Vietnam, Beirut, and the African savannas. He even throws in a Hemingway-esque fight to the death with a blue marlin off Florida and a danger-filled trip on an Alaskan river that almost took his son's life. Library Journal's Linda M. Kaufmann praised Caputo's "evocative language" in this collection, that "brings to life the wonder and power of the natural world."

If you enjoy the works of Philip Caputo

If you enjoy the works of Philip Caputo, you may also want to check out the following books:

John Balaban, After Our War, 1974.

Walter Dean Myers, The Fallen Angels, 1988.

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried, 1990.

In all his work, Caputo speaks of a primal struggle between the hidden evil in mankind or perhaps the wild, untamed side of human nature, and the forces of order and civilization. He manages to impart his message in novels, personal memoirs, and nonfiction. Speaking with Matthew Nelson in a Publishers Weekly interview, Caputo compared his two primary narrative forms: "Writing nonfiction is much easier than writing fiction, because all of your raw material is there. All the facts of the situation are there, and it's really a matter of assembling those facts in a graceful and hopefully beautiful narrative. . . . But with fiction, it's starting from ground zero. You have to manufacture your own raw material and then shape it. That's a far more difficult process, an enterprise that requires more concentration and attention to detail."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Beidler, Philip D., American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1982.

Beidler, Philip D., Rewriting America, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1991.

Caputo, Philip, A Rumor of War, Holt (New York, NY), 1977, published as A Rumor of War: With a Twentieth Anniversary Postscript by the Author, 1996.

Caputo, Philip, Means of Escape: An Imagined Memoir, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1991.

Hellman, John, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1986.

Meyers, Thomas, Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Rowe, John Carlos, and Rick Berg, The Vietnam War and American Culture, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Book, July-August, 2002, Eric Wargo, review of Ghosts of Tsavo, p. 80.

Booklist, December 15, 1995, Brad Hooper, review of Equation for Evil, p. 667; April 15, 1997, Brad Hooper, review of Exiles, pp. 1364-1365; September 1, 1999, Brad Hooper, review of The Voyage,
p. 7; May 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Ghosts of Tsavo, p. 1442.

Boys' Life, October, 2002, Rich Haddaway, review of Ghosts of Tsavo, p. 14.

Library Journal, December 15, 1980, Robert H. Donahugh, review of Horn of Africa; June 1, 1997, David W. Henderson, review of Exiles, p. 153; September 15, 1999, David W. Henderson, review of The Voyage, p. 110; March 15, 2002, Michael Rogers, review of Horn of Africa, p. 113; June 15, 2002, Wilda Williams, review of Ghosts of Tsavo, p. 91; September 1, 2002, Linda M. Kaufmann, review of In the Shadows of the Morning, p. 200.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 23, 1983, Elaine Kendall, review of DelCorso's Gallery, p. 2; June 21, 1987, Dick Roraback, review of Indian Country, p. 2; October 27, 1991, William Broyles, Jr., review of Means of Escape, p. 1; March 10, 1996, Roger L. Simon, review of Equation for Evil, p. 1; June 8, 1997, Gloria Emerson, review of Exiles,
p. 7; December 24, 1999, Michael Frank, review of The Voyage, p. 3; June 2, 2002, John Balzar, review of Ghosts of Tsavo, p. 11.

Magill Book Review, May 1, 1992, Edwin T. Arnold, review of Means of Escape.

New York Times, June 9, 1997, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Exiles, p. C14.

New York Times Book Review, May 29, 1977, Theodore Solotaroff, review of A Rumor of War; November 2, 1980, Peter Andrews, review of Horn of Africa, pp. 12-13; November 13, 1983, Joe Klein, review of DelCorso's Gallery, pp. 14-15; October 27, 1991, Morley Safer, review of Means of Escape; November 7, 1999, Andrea Barrett, review of The Voyage,
p. 32; October 6, 2002, Tyler D. Johnson, review of Ghosts of Tsavo, p. 33.

People Weekly, October 3, 1983, review of DelCorso'sGallery, pp. 16-17; April 1, 1996, "Deadly Deja Vu,"
p. 72.

Publishers Weekly, August 22, 1980, review of Horn ofAfrica; August 16, 1991, review of Means of Escape,
p. 43; December 4, 1995, review of Equation for Evil, p. 51; January 29, 1996, Robert Dahlin, "Philip Caputo: Facing Evil Vietnam to Suburbia," pp. 80-81; April 28, 1997, review of Exiles,
p. 47; September 6, 1999, review of The Voyage,
p. 78; May 20, 2002, review of Ghosts of Tsavo,
p. 57, and Matthew Nelson, "PW Talks with Philip Caputo," p. 58.

Time, September 26, 1983, J. D. Reed, review of DelCorso's Gallery, p. 72; May 18, 1987, review of Indian Country, p. 83; August 26, 2002, Lev Grossman, review of Ghosts of Tsavo, p. 60.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), Harrison E. Salisbury, review of Means of Escape; March 31, 1996, James McManus, review of Equation for Evil, p.5; July 21, 2002, Stephen Mihm, review of Ghosts of Tsavo,
p. 8.

U. S. Catholic, July, 2002, review of A Rumor of War,
p. 46.

Washington Post Book World, May 10, 1987, John Byrne Cook, review of Indian Country, p. 3; March 17, 1996, Richard Bausch, review of Equation for Evil, p. 3.