Escape Books

Charles Jansen wrote a classic of light backpacking. Though this book is dated, it has a lot of good basic information for the minimalist hiker or camper.

What's dated are the materials of camping; tents have gotten cheaper and lighter with new nylon materials and flexible tent frames. Ditto the backpacks and Gore-Tex has revolutionized boots and outerwear.

What's still good is the basic camping advice and the ideas for packing meals out of dehydrated or concentrated foods. Charles and his family took many family vacations in the woods and left a minimal impact with simple walking in and out and carrying what they needed. If you like to hike and camp, this is still a great book to use for basic camping know-how.

A little boy takes a walk through the woods. He becomes thirsty and sees a little wooden house. He stops at the house to ask for a glass of water. The little old lady lets him in, but the woman isn't just any old lady. She's the Wicked Witch of the Woods! The Witch has the little boy help her prepare her famous "little boy soup" and the boy needs to think fast to escape.

The kids at the day care I taught at loved this book. I read it seven times within a two hour setting. I never got tired of reading it, though. It's a great story with a delightful ending. In some ways, it reminded me of the classic Rumplestiltskin fairy tale.

This was recommended for children 11 and up in A Landscape With Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind, and I recommend both books.
The Long Escape is based on a true story, and it tells of the matron of a children's convalescent center in Belgium and how she shepherded the 50 children in her care through Belgium to England when the Germans invaded. It did not dwell at too much length and in graphic detail on the horrors of war, neither did it gloss them over. People die, shockingly, suddenly, and there is nothing anybody can do- not even bury the bodies. The living must continue in their race to save their own lives and the lives of those children.

Racing through a recently bombed town trying to rejoin her group of children, the matron passes bombed buildings and a bloody baby carriage, and can only say a prayer for the departed soul of the baby who must have been in the carriage as she continues to run- there are no other details- this is enough to portray the horrors of war to the young without searing their minds forever with details they may not be ready for.

Very well done, I thought.

"The Long Walk" by Slavomir Rawicz is the most unforgetable book I have ever read, which I read for the first time in about 1959. Based on a true story, it is one of several ultimate accountings of human perservance, fortitude,and survival against overwhelming odds. I have read the book more than a dozen times and have given gifts of as many copies. When I think of it, it still brings tears to my eyes. I don't know why a film has not been made of this book.

One in four American's according to the book are codependent upon something - alcohol or drugs, relationships, work, sexuality, food, etc.

This book deals wth recovery for codependent realtionships and part of that process to recovery takes you through 10 various stages as pinted out in the book; but the key is seeing that all the love and hunger that your heart desires is really about connecting with God. A simple message that most of us do not get.

A good book to gift to others or to yourself.

Is it important to test,and or dwell upon your love for Jesus Christ?The Puritans thought so,which is why whole books were written with this theme. Are complete books being written on this theme at present,I think not.I wonder why that is the case.I could guess at some of the reasons why that is, but I'm sure I do not know many of the reasons why that is so.
If you have never read any books written by the Puritans,you are missing out on a spiritual feast. A great place to start would be 'Love To Christ...' by Thomas Doolittle or 'The True Christians Love For The Unseen Christ'by Thomas Vincent.
In many books by the Puritans the outlines alone have far more depth and Biblical light than most modern books. In chapter five Thomas Doolittle gives eight reasons why love for Christ and (what type of love to Christ) is required: these are a few of them 1.Love commands the whole man(this is the type of love that the Lord requires of us)2.If Christ has our love He has our all(again the kind of love that pleases the Lord)3.Without love,all other things,though ever so many,great and excellent in themselves,are not acceptable to God(this is priority of love).
We can learn much from Pastor Doolittle (and the Puritans in general)on how to plead with sinners and reason with saints to encourage them to(run to God for mercy),and live their lives in a way that is increasingly pleasing to the Lord.On pages 151 to 152 the author is appealing to the reader to wean themselves from the love of the world,self and sin and he concludes this section with reasoning and pleading thus:"What! Is Christ the only unlovely object in your eyes?Can you find love for anything but Christ?What is it in Christ that doth displease you?What do you see in Him that is offensive to you? Either love Him or give a reason why you will not." Where do we encounter such pleading to forsake all other loves and love Christ supremely?
Why a book of such enourmous spiritual value has such a relatively small audience,reveals more about the times that we live in,than it does about the value of this treatise.

This is a great book, well written with nothing lost in the translation. The story grips you, even though Devigny knew in the beginning what his fate probably would be. I liked his description of the prison - you can almost smell the place. He doesn't dwell too much on the depressing aspects of the prison but rather the spirit of his comrades. He acknowledges the luck involved in his escape while leaving the reader plenty to admire with his typical French daring and panache. Devigny writes some of his experience in an ambiguous manner but it is for the best - in a situation like that, you understand, ambiguity is a fact of daily life.

While reading this story you'll find your heart beating faster and almost too loud. And you'll sympathize for those who are worthy of success but fail through no fault of their own. I read this book wanting to understand a bit more of how differently those in the underground were treated than the normal POW's and this was a masterpiece. The fact that in the final chapter Devigny wins perhaps his greatest battle leaves the reader a better person for having read the book.

I rated this book a big 5 because it helped me accomplish what I dreamed of doing... Escaping from the ratrace and moving to the beautiful Texas hill country.

I purchased the book twelve years ago and read it constantly.. It helped keep my dream alive when the preparation time seemed to take forever... Indeed, it took about five years to get the money together and go.

A fun book to help you get out of the dreaming mode and actually GET MOVING!!!

The book goes into detail on the planning stage AND how to take care of business while you're out on your sailboat, moterhome or whatever... There's even a chapter on traveling with children.

Good luck!

What an A-Mazing book! The book is called, "The A-Mazing Escape," and each of the 6 stories contain 2 pages of fun learning.

The book contains 5 small punch-out circles of Bible figures: Moses, Aaron, Pharoah, Egyptian Soldiers, and Hebrews. Each spread tells a short story on the left side of the page, and tells you which circle figure to put into the maze on the right side of the page. I couldn't wait to try this book -- it looked like fun!

I was having fun, until...Moses got stuck midway on his journey through the maze, and I got a little frustrated. I asked my 7 year old to see if she could easily dislodge the cut-out circle of Moses. After banging the book on the table a bit, Moses finally fell loose and we juggled him through the rest of the maze.

The idea for this book is great, and many parts of the mazes do allow the pieces to move easily through. Although a few of the mazes worked rather well, the few that didn't made it a bit frustrating. The best parts of this book are it's interactivity, the fun mazes, and the ability of the reader to become involed in Bible story learning.

Recommended for children over age 5 (beware of small pieces).

I'm going to post the Publisher Comments and also the Kirkus Reviews here because it will better tell you what this book is about and because there are no other reviews and I'm a lousy reviewer. I've read A Rumor of War (loved), Horn of Africa (loved), Delcorso's Gallery (didn't care for), The Voyage (Loved), Acts of Faith (loved) and of course Means of Escape (Loved)
Mr. Caputo's been through some mighty harrowing experiences in his life as a war correspondent and soldier. I love his writing and his views.


Publisher Comments:
Philip Caputo has been a witness to the most important struggles of our time, from the hot green hell of Vietnam to the dusty mountains of Afghanistan and the bloodstained streets of Beirut. In Means of Eascape, Caputo intersperses imaginative retellings of events he witnessed with true accounts of how he became a writer, and what happened when he was sent to some of the most dangerous places in the world. He begins with his childhood and budding career in Chicago. Soon after, he was deep in the Sinai Peninsula searching for the last authentic Bedouin, and reporting from the front lines of the Yom Kippur War. In an eerie parallel to journalist Daniel Pearl's tragic murder, Caputo was held hostage for a week by Islamic extremists while reporting in Beirut. Caputo's palpable descriptions of the captors and fellow cellmates in this razor-thin existence are as compelling as any escape stroy before or since. As he emerged from captivity, Peter Jennings congratulated him on his eventual escape, and on the Pulizer Prize he'd won while imprisoned. While continuing his work as a reporter in Beirut, he was singled out by a sniper, and received a bullet in his ankle and a chunk of wall in his head. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, he joined the Mujahideen for a clandestine mission and was nearly captured by Soviet forces. Few authors have put themselves so squarely in the center of the 20th century's great conflicts, and even fewer can describe what they saw as well as Philip Caputo does in this important memoir. (6 x 9, 416 pages)Philip Caputo is the author of the New York Times best-seller A Rumor of War and three novels: Indian Country, DelCorso's Gallery, and Horn of Africa. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 as part of an investigative team for the Chicago Tribune, and his coverage of his experience as a captive of Palestinian guerrillas won him the Overseas Press Club's George Polk Citation.

Kirkus Reviews
An intensely personal, albeit consistently affecting and frequently riveting memoir of years of living dangerously. Caputo (A Rumor of War, Indian Country, etc.) has witnessed much of the worst violence that marked the latter half of the 20th century. A combat veteran of Vietnam, he went on to cover trouble spots throughout the Third World as a roving correspondent for The Chicago Tribune. Describing himself as drawn to history (if not to the sound of the guns), the globe-trotting author has reported on insurgency in Eritrea, civil strife in Lebanon, Israel's October War, the fall of Saigon, and a host of lesser belligerencies. Looking for a "good war" several years after having quit the journalism trade, Caputo accepted an assignment from Esquire that took him deep behind Soviet lines in Afghanistan. Venturesome to the point of rashness, he has paid the price of boldness on many occasions. Though he made it through Vietnam without a physical scratch, for example, the author was imprisoned by Palestinian guerrillas in Beirut and later sustained severe wounds (at the hands of Christian militia) in the same city, leaving him with a still-painful limp. Peacefully settled in one place now, he's content to let a workroom window overlooking a salt marsh on the Long Island Sound serve as his new means of escape. Caputo nonetheless looks back on his days as a rolling stone with some relish and few apparent regrets. Indeed, he retains a rueful sense of barracks humor neatly summarized in an ultrarude anecdote whose moral is: "the final indignity is that there is no final indignity." An episodic, impressionistic, and dead-honest narrative that affords memorable as well as consequentialinsights into a chaotic era's noteworthy conflicts.