Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #381508 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-25
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

About the Author
Alex Kershaw is the author of the widely acclaimed and bestselling books The Bedford Boys, The Longest Winter, and The Few, and two biographies: Jack London and Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

A real life tear jerker. Reads like a novel. I loved it!
I loved this book. It actually made me cry. I had no idea that Robert Capa had an affair with Ingrid Bergman (among others!) and it is brilliantly told. I have read a few of Alex Kershaw's books and the thing I really love about them is that they tell true stories in an exciting way. They really do read like novels -- rather than the usual stuffy, worthy bios that get written that only an obsessive fan of the subject could be bothered to wade through. Deserves to be made into a movie.

The 20th Century's greatest photojournalist
The life of Robert Capa is fascinating. Born in Budapest in 1913, he was to die forty years later in Vietnam after establishing himself as one of the great photojournalists of the 20th Century. He captured on film some of the most memorable pictures in the Spanish Civil War, including the iconic "The Falling Soldier." A shameless propagandist for the Republican cause, he thought nothing of having combatants "pose" for some of his most dramatic pictures - including, many think, "The Falling Soldier." Did the republican soldier fall because he was shot or because he tripped? Was it posed? The jury is still out on that one. A Jew at a time when anti-Semitism was rife in Europe, he became a committed anti-fascist and socialist. He established the photographers' co-operative, Magnum, in order that photographers had control over their own photographs and earnings. This was not so different to the kibbutzim established in Israel by highly idealistic settlers whom he so admired. Needless to say, Capa was there to record the birth of the fledgling state of Israel in 1948 and caught on film that nation's birth pains as it battled with its Arab neighbours. War was his medium, even though he hated it. He went over in a landing craft to photograph the D-Day landings and produced some of the most memorable pictures of battle ever taken. This was despite that most of the pictures were ruined during the rushed processing in London and some of those that survived are out of focus.

Capa was talented, generous, humorous, and charismatic. An inveterate gambler, he played poker with the likes of John Huston and Ernest Hemmingway, and inevitably lost. Like most people who don't care about money, money problems plagued him. Highly sexed, he counted some of the most beautiful women of the age amongst his lovers, including Ingrid Bergman. When lovers were not immediately available, he contended himself with prostitutes. Loving and loved in return, he was too much of a bohemian to commit himself to a permanent relationship. He could have been rich, but he never was. He could have happily married, but he never did.

Capa's luck ran out when he went to Vietnam in 1953 to cover the war between the French and the Vietnamese and trod on a landmine.

Alex Kershaw deserves credit for writing such a meticulously researched and readable biography.