A Rumor of War

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

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

This was that war's first big book by a veteran and still the best

Colin Smith, The Week

A classic

Guardian

All men who go to war experience a moral as well as a physical odyssey, but few were as dramatic as that of Philip Caputo … a sensation that was elevated to instant classic status … I would rate his book much higher than Michael Herr’s celebrated Dispatches … much of the value of this immensely readable tale of a young man’s murderous follies is that he tells many things that are not peculiar to Vietnam, but embrace the behaviour and feelings – or lack of them – of soldiers on all battlefields

Max Hastings, Sunday Times

A classic

Guardian

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

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

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

New York Times

Superb. At times it is hard to remember that this is not a novel

New Statesman

This was that war's first big book by a veteran and still the best

Colin Smith, The Week

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