Philip Caputo has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.5★ across 9 ratings. The most-rated is A Rumor of War.
A Rumor of War
Summary
When it first appeared, A Rumor of War brought home to American readers, with terrifying vividness and honesty, the devastating effects of the Vietnam War on the soldiers who fought there. And while it is a memoir of one young man's experiences and therefore deeply personal, it is also a book that speaks powerfully to today's students about the larger themes of human conscience, good and evil, and the desperate extremes men are forced to confront in any war. A platoon commander in the first combat unit sent to fight in Vietnam, Lieutenant Caputo landed at Danang on March 8, 1965, convinced that American forces would win a quick and decisive victory over the Communists. Sixteen months later, and without ceremony, Caputo left Vietnam a shell-shocked veteran whose youthful idealism and faith in the rightness of the war had been utterly shattered. A Rumor of War tells the story of that trajectory and allows us to see and feel the reality of the conflict as the author himself experienced it, from the weeks of tedium hacking through scorching jungles, to the sudden violence of ambushes and firefights, to the unbreakable bonds of friendship forged between soldiers, and finally to a sense of the war as having no purpose other than the fight for survival. Most troubling, Caputo gives us an unflinching view not only of remarkable bravery and heroism but also of the atrocities committed in Vietnam by ordinary men so numbed by fear and desperate to survive that their moral distinctions had collapsed. More than a statement against war, Caputo's memoir offers readers today a profoundly visceral sense of what war is and, as the author says, of "the things men do in war and the things war does to men".
©1996 Philip Caputo (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
Hunter's Moon
Summary
From Philip Caputo - the author of A Rumor of War, The Longest Road, and Some Rise By Sin - comes a captivating mosaic of stories set in a small town where no act is private and the past is never really past. Hunter’s Moon is set in Michigan’s wild, starkly beautiful Upper Peninsula, where a cast of recurring characters move into and out of each other’s lives, building friendships, facing loss, confronting violence, trying to bury the past, or seeking to unearth it. Once-a-year lovers, old high-school buddies on a hunting trip, a college professor and his wayward son, and a middle-aged man and his grief-stricken father come together, break apart, and, if they’re fortunate, find a way forward. Hunter’s Moon offers an engaging, insightful look at everyday lives but also a fresh perspective on the way men navigate in today’s world.
©2019 Philip Caputo (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
The Longest Road
Summary
September 1996 found Philip Caputo on Barter Island, a wind-scoured rock in the Beaufort Sea populated by two hundred Inupiat and a handful of whites. As he gazed upon an American flag above the only school for a 150 miles, he marveled that the children in that school pledged allegiance to the same flag as the children of Cuban immigrants on Key West, almost six thousand miles away. Awed by America’s vastness and diversity and filled with a renewed appreciation for its cohesiveness, an idea began to form. With enough time, gas money, and nerve he could drive from the southernmost point to the northernmost point of the United States that is reachable by road, talking to people as he went and trying to better understand what holds our great country together. Cicada-like, the idea went dormant, not to be reawakened for 14 years. In 2011, America was struggling through the greatest economic downturn since the Depression and was more divided than it had been in living memory. Caputo, who had just turned 70, his wife, and their two English setters took off in a truck hauling an Airstream camper from Key West, Florida, en route via back roads and state routes to Deadhorse, Alaska. The journey took four months and covered 17,000 miles, during which Caputo interviewed more than 80 Americans from all walks of life to get a picture of what their lives and the life of the nation are really about in the 21st century.
©2013 Philip Caputo. Recorded by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved. (P)2013 HighBridge Company
Acts of Faith
Summary
Douglas Braithwaite is an American aviator and managing director of an airline flying humanitarian aid from Kenya to war-ravaged Sudan. Quinette Hardin is an evangelical Christian from Iowa whose human rights group works to redeem slaves from Arab raiders. Fitzhugh Martin is a multiracial Kenyan seeking a calling that will rejuvenate his directionless life. These and other characters populate Philip Caputo's riveting novel that describes the classic confrontation between Westerners and the Third World, people who go forth with solid commitments to human rights but find themselves plunged into a kind of moral corruption for which they are ill prepared. Braithwaite and Hardin are passionate idealists who deeply believe in their crusades, but their strengths are their weaknesses, and in the cauldron of modern Africa, circumstances conspire with their flaws to cause their sense of mission to curdle into self-righteous zealotry and greed, leading them to conspiracy and murder. This is a novel with plenty of action, three strong romances, two of them interracial, and some wonderful characters: bush pilots, Sudanese warlords, an Englishwoman straight out of Out of Africa, and an ambitious CNN reporter. Caputo has a strong sense of his chosen territory, and the result is a novel that is gripping and thoughtful - a cautionary tale for Americans of the 21st century.
©2005 Philip Caputo (P)2011 Audible, Inc.