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The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious
Disappearance of Fred Cuny
Scott Anderson
Retail Price: $24.95
Our Price: $17.46 You Save: $7.49 (30%)
In-Stock: Ships within 24 hours

Format: Hardcover, 384pp.
ISBN: 0385486650
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Incorporated
Pub. Date: May 1999

Quotes
This is the kind of book I love: a can-of-worms odyssey by a journalist
with balls of brass and a relentless determination to get to the truth.
What starts out as a search for facts turns into a Conradesque epic, a
journey into a real-life heart of darkness where every hall is mirrored,
nothing is what it seems, and every truth uncovered leads to a deeper
mystery. The Man Who Tried To Save The World has all the elements of a
Hollywood blockbuster - and enigmatic Yank with military and spy
connections, shadowy Russian spooks, mysterious women, bandits and
brigands, Chechnyan warlords, even missing nukes - with this difference:
it's all true. (Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire) �Steven
Pressfield

Scott Anderson's The Man Who Tried To Save The World is a taut thriller
of wartime intrigue that also happens to be true. Through the story of
Fred Cuny's disappearance, Anderson gives us the story of Chechnya, and
he does so with a reporter's exactitude and a novelist's sense of the
tragic and absurd. A powerful, many-layered book. (Darcy Frey, author of
The Last Shot) �Darcy Frey

This is war at its most brutal, and war reporting at its finest. Scott
Anderson's tour through Chechnya in search of a lost American
humanitarian ranks as one of the most thrilling stories I've ever read.
That Anderson made it out alive is incredible, but this is not just an
adventure story, but a mystery of the first order.  �Sebastian Junger


Reviews and Commentary
We love reading reviews�and the more of them, the better. We didn�t
write the reviews below (other people did), but we thought you�d be
interested in their comments.

This Book was reviewed by:  The Publisher,  Esquire,  Richard Beeston -
The New York Times Book Review  and  Kirkus

>From The Publisher:
Fred Cuny spent his life in terrible places. In countries rent by war,
earthquake, famine, and hurricane, Cuny saved hundreds of thousands of
lives with a fearlessness that amazed all who knew him. A Texan, a
teller of tall tales, a womanizer, and a renegade, Cuny grew ever more
daring in his globe-trotting adventures as his motivations became
murkier. Was he a danger junkie? A CIA spy? Or a man who truly believed
he had the wits and courage to save the world? After twenty-five years
of heroic work that earned Cuny the nickname "Master of Disaster," he
set off to the rogue Russian republic of Chechnya, a land of gangsters
and Islamic terrorists, a quasi-state engaged in an unimaginably savage
war with a Russian army of drunken, brutal incompetents. Cuny went to
 try to stop the war, but for the first time in his life he was scared,
unsure of himself in an insane landscape where betrayal and murder
lurked behind every face. He failed to stop the horror, yet soon
returned to Chechnya on a mysterious mission. Cuny was last seen on a
lonely mountain road, headed for a rebel fortress that was being
subjected to the most intense artillery bombardment since World War II.
War correspondent Scott Anderson became obsessed with Cuny's fate, and
ventured into the deadly war zone himself in search of answers to
several haunting questions: Whom was Cuny working for? What happened to
him, and why? Most powerfully, what sort of man believes he can save the
world?

>From Esquire:
...[I]mpressively obsessive reportage...

>From Richard Beeston - The New York Times Book Review:
...Anderson has to work through several theories before getting to the
truth about Fred Cuny....I [wonder] what he would have made of Kosovo
and the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the region. If anyone could
have figured a way out of this mess, it would have been Cuny.

>From Kirkus:
A masterful portrait of Fred Cuny, a renegade Texan who certainly
deserved his nickname, ``Master of Disaster.'' It's hard to name a major
disaster in the last 20 years that didn�t find Cuny at the helm of the
rescue effort. Operation Provide Comfort, the joint civilian and
military effort to save the Iraqi Kurds? Cuny was there and an
organizational hero. Somalia? Cuny was there as well. Bosnia too, but
that crisis turned his attention from providing relief to creating
blueprints for solving man-made disasters, i.e., wars. That decision
proved fatal. Cuny's demise came in Chechnya, where he mysteriously
disappeared on a so-called relief mission. His body has never been
found, despite an intense search by many, including those authorized by
top US officials and billionaire philanthropist George Soros's Open
Society Institute, which had hired Cuny on many occasions. At its best,
the book reads like a Tom Clancy thriller, full of secret meetings,
wrong leads, and political innuendo. Cuny's son is told by the Russians
that his body, sans face, has been found. But how did they identify him?
When the family finally gets the corpse, it's too short and the face
turns out to have been obliterated by sulfuric acid. Why the body
double? These are just a few of the many questions surrounding this
larger-than-life man who dedicated himself to helping others and�not
coincidentally, according to journalist and novelist Anderson (Triage,
1998)�to making a reputation for himself. Was Cuny a CIA operative? Was
he killed by Chechan rebels after disinformation spread by Russian
intelligence operatives claimed he was anti-Islam? Or was he killed, as
Anderson posits, on the order of Chechan President Dudayev? Or something
in between? We may never know, but this much is certainly obvious: Cuny
was a man whose humanitarian impact cannot be denied and who will be
missed. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) .


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