Philip Caputo's Blog, page 18
April 21, 2013
CROSSERS REVIEW
“Crossers” attempts to present a complex portrait, a mosaic in words, if you will, of what life is like “on the line:” the frontier between the U.S. and Mexico, between two cultures. It’s also story about the moral and emotional crossings people make, prodded by circumstances and their own characters.
Immigration and border issues have returned to the front burner in Washington, and to the front pages, but those issues can come across as abstractions to those who live far from the border. I think, in my own admittedly prejudiced estimation, that the novel brings life to them. If truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction can be truer than fact by illuminating the recesses of the human heart and mind beyond the range of the media’s lights. As Ezra Pound observed, literature is news that stays news.
CROSSERS review
I invite visitors to this site to read this review of my 2009 novel, “Crossers”. http://brooklynbugle.com/2013/04/19/brooklyn-bugle-book-club-crossers-by-philip-caputo. It sums up the book quite well.
“Crossers” attempts to present a complex portrait, a mosaic in words, if you will, of what life is like “on the line:” the frontier between the U.S. and Mexico, between two cultures. It’s also story about the moral and emotional crossings people make, prodded by circumstances and their own characters.
Immigration and border issues have returned to the front burner in Washington, and to the front pages, but those issues can come across as abstractions to those who live far from the border. I think, in my own admittedly prejudiced estimation, that the novel brings life to them. If truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction can be truer than fact by illuminating the recesses of the human heart and mind beyond the range of the media’s lights. As Ezra Pound observed, literature is news that stays news.
Read more about Crossers on this site.
The post CROSSERS review appeared first on Philip Caputo.
CROSSERS REVIEW
I invite visitors to this site to read this review of my 2009 novel, “Crossers”. http://brooklynbugle.com/2013/04/19/brooklyn-bugle-book-club-crossers-by-philip-caputo. It sums up the book quite well.
“Crossers” attempts to present a complex portrait, a mosaic in words, if you will, of what life is like “on the line:” the frontier between the U.S. and Mexico, between two cultures. It’s also story about the moral and emotional crossings people make, prodded by circumstances and their own characters.
Immigration and border issues have returned to the front burner in Washington, and to the front pages, but those issues can come across as abstractions to those who live far from the border. I think, in my own admittedly prejudiced estimation, that the novel brings life to them. If truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction can be truer than fact by illuminating the recesses of the human heart and mind beyond the range of the media’s lights. As Ezra Pound observed, literature is news that stays news.
Read more about Crossers on this site.
The post CROSSERS REVIEW appeared first on Philip Caputo.
March 27, 2013
About THE LONGEST ROAD book trailer
I’m urging visitors to this site to take a look at the trailer for my new book, The Longest Road (subtitled: Overland in Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean), to be published in July of this year by Henry Holt and Company. The trailer can also be viewed by visiting my author page on Amazon, as well as on my channel at YouTube. It sums up, in five minutes, what The Longest Road is about and what motivated me to write it. Laura E. Kelly produced the trailer, and I’m confident you’ll agree that she did an excellent job. I’m the narrator. The rendition of Woody Guthrie’s deathless anthem to America, “This Land is Your Land,” on the soundtrack was arranged and played by Laura’s uncle, Stephen Bachle. She told me that she remembers him from her childhood as a typical “Sixties guy” with long hair, playing “Puff the Magic Dragon” endlessly on his guitar. Laura was pleased to find out that uncle Stephen hadn’t lost his chops.
Most of the photographs in the slide show were taken by wife, Leslie Ware. The one that moves me most is the shot of the empty, two-lane blacktop shooting off through the deserts of northern Arizona. Looking at it, I feel that I’m seeing, rather than reading, Walt Whitman’s great poem, Song of the Open Road.
From The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman’s epic saga of crossing the great plains in the mid-19th century, to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways in the 20th, the road has been the subject of many books written by the restless authors of this restless nation. I hope mine will earn a place on the shelf with the best of them. And, of course, I hope you’ll enjoy reading The Longest Road, vicariously traveling with me from subtropical Florida to the northernmost reaches of Alaska. You’ll meet the people I did, and I think you’ll come away with the same impression: that quite often, the most ordinary men and women have extraordinary stories to tell.
Visit my page on this site about The Longest Road for choices on where to pre-order the book.
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March 9, 2013
Tone-Deaf Senators
My jihad for more effective gun-control laws continues with this radio commentary, which aired on the March 8 Morning Edition of New England Public Radio. It’s essentially a version of the op-ed piece I wrote for the Washington Post, condensed for a 4-minute broadcast. NPR had asked me for it, and I agreed to record it, in the faint hope that it might open a few deaf ears, particularly in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
I say a “faint” hope because of an interview I saw recently on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN. (You can watch it at: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2013/03/01/ac-flynn-gun-control.cnn).
The man being interviewed was Edward Flynn, police chief of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, following his appearance at a Senate hearing on a proposed assault weapons ban. Chief Flynn had had an heated exchange with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, but I won’t go into that. What struck me was his angry response to the actions of some conservative members of the committee as people from Newtown, Conn., were about to offer their testimony. The senators walked out!
“I was appalled,” Flynn told Cooper. “They found urgent business elsewhere.”
He had every right to be appalled. One might ask, “What could be more urgent than passing legislation that will save innocent lives, especially the lives of our children?” Those senators’ answer appears to have been, “Making sure we don’t offend the NRA and other gun-lobby groups is more urgent. We want to get re-elected.” Their refusal to hear from those whose lives were wrecked by the massacre at Sandy Hook school was both cowardly and callous, though it may have been in keeping with the “Christian” values they so often espouse. After all, as was said at the memorial service for the victims, the slaughter added “twenty new angels” to heaven’s population of white-winged souls.
I said in my op-ed piece and radio commentary that the guns themselves are the problem – the assault rifles, the semi-automatic pistols with high capacity magazines. That problem is aggravated by another – the culture of violence that’s grown in this country in the past thirty-odd years, a metastasizing cancer on our collective soul. The hyper-realistic, interactive computer games that give the gamer the thrill of annihilating entire crowds with less effort than it takes to crush an ant. The blood-drenched movies racking up doomsday body counts. There are so many explosions in these gory epics that merely watching the trailers is enough to give you shell-shock.
The target audience for this stuff is young men. Probably, ninety-nine out of a hundred can play the games and watch the films without being affected, but the one out of a hundred who is affected, dangerously so, should concern us. The Adam Lanzas, the Jared Loughners. To such unstable minds, murder becomes an acceptable way to solve your problems and express yourself, and the ease with which they can obtain firearms gives them the means to realize their horrific fantasies. Do you have a grievance against society? Are you pissed off at the boss who fired you? Hey, buy an AR-15, load a 30-round banana clip, and shoot everyone in the office. Or open up in a crowded movie theater, and prove that the limit on the 1st amendment – You can say anything you want except to yell “fire!” in a crowded theater – doesn’t apply to the 2d amendment.
The cultural cancer is evident within the gun-culture. Recently, I had a conversation and an exchange of letters with an old Marine buddy from Vietnam, who later became a sociologist. Like me, he’s a hunter and target-shooter; also like me, he’s outraged by the gun-lobby’s indifference to the bloodshed firearms are causing in the United States. Thirty-thousand homicides and suicides a year (Yeah, I know the old bumper sticker: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” And I know the counter-bumper-sticker: “People kill people – with guns.”).
In the past twenty years, my friend has made an unofficial study of what goes on in gun stores and at gun shows and shooting ranges from Maine to California.
“The participants have changed,” he wrote to me. “There has been a change from stable, mature farmers, ranchers, outdoorsmen, and military veterans who admire and appreciate the craftsmanship, structural beauty, and historical value of firearms to immature, unstable, anti-social, angry, paranoid, delusional, and insecure people who are fascinated by and obsessed with the capability of the most contemporary guns to create mayhem by spraying as many bullets as quickly as possible.”
I guess the votes of such people were on the minds of the senators who walked out of the hearing.
Mass killings took place in America when my friend and I were growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, but they were as rare as July 4th snowfalls. They are now commonplace. In the mid-1990s, while I was researching for my crime novel, Equation for Evil, I learned that some newspapers had adopted an unusual editorial policy. A mass killing would rate front-page coverage only if the number of victims exceeded four.
Two days after the Newtown butchery, I woke at three in the morning, thinking about the murdered kids and their families. I couldn’t get back to sleep when my thoughts turned to my three granddaughters, ages ten, four, and three. Later on, I phoned. I had to hear their voices. I spoke to the ten-year-old, who was old enough to be aware of the massacre. At the end of our conversation, I told her, “Stay alert, sweetie. Be aware of your surroundings at all times, keep on the lookout for trouble.”
It was not unlike the advice I’d given to marines I trained after I rotated back from Vietnam: Stay alert, stay alive. Maybe those were the wrong words to voice to a child, but that’s what we’ve come to – a granddad counseling his granddaughter to be vigilant, because he’s afraid some heavily-armed maniac will try to kill her.
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February 27, 2013
Feb. 26: Great event at the Sun City Oro Valley private library
An SRO audience of 170 attended this event, where I spoke about my 2009 novel, Crossers, and my forthcoming travel book, The Longest Road. Sometimes readings and/or lectures can be tedious for a writer; this one was a pleasure. The audience was enthusiastic and asked good questions. Afterward, I autographed copies of Crossers provided by the Antigone book store of Tucson, and pretty much sold out the stock. Not too bad for a couple of hours work. And it was gratifying to see a real, live, independent book seller selling real, live, printed books.
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January 19, 2013
My novel CROSSERS has been optioned
CROSSERS (2009)
I’m pleased to announce that my novel, Crossers, has recently been optioned for a feature film or TV adaptation by American Entertainment Investors, Inc., one of the leading financial advisors to the independent film industry. AEI’s clients include such prominent production companies as Alcon Entertainment, River Road Entertainment, and Exclusive Media Group. AEI also advised Goldman Sachs and Assured Guarantee on restructuring The Weinstein Company in 2010.
Read the plot summary and reviews about the book here.
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December 29, 2012
Feb. 26: Speaking at the Sun City Oro Valley private library
I’ll be speaking at the Sun City Oro Valley Library in Arizona for their February 26 Friends of the Library “Books and Author” event. My topic will be my last novel, CROSSERS, which will doubtlessly lead to discussions about immigration, drug smuggling, and other border issues.
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December 22, 2012
“Blame the killing machines: guns”
The Newtown, Connecticut, schoolchildren shootings brought back memories of a 1989 story I did for Esquire about a similar awful incident. Here’s a link to my December 21 essay for The Washington Post about what I learned when writing that article.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-21/opinions/36017415_1_patrick-purdy-guns-people
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