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Michael Capuzzo
Michael Capuzzo is the author of the acclaimed international bestseller Close to Shore, the definitive historical thriller of the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks that inspired Jaws. Close To Shore was on the New YorkTimes bestseller list and expanded list for more than five months. One of the three best nonfiction books of 2001 with Seabiscuit and John Adams, according to People magazine, it was hailed as a modern classic of social history and science writing, one of the best books ever written about sharks, as well as a nonfiction thriller “scarier than Jaws.” The book was excerpted in the London Times and read in London as the “BBC Book of the Week.” Among worldwide rave reviews The New Yorker said Close to Shore “deserves a place among the adventure classics” and was written “with an artistry reminiscent of Stephen Crane…” Gay Talese called it a “masterpiece” of American historical writing and research. Widely praised for storytelling power and literary distinction rare in a nonfiction book, both Close to Shore and The Murder Room were nominated by their publishers (Random House and Penguin Books respectively) for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction.
In The Murder Room, Mike turned from history’s most famous shark serial killer to telling the story of murderers and the great detectives of the Vidocq Society who track them down. Capuzzo assisted ABC News 20/20 producers in shaping The Murder Room into a one-hour ABC special scheduled to air August 13, 2010. Advance praise called The Murder Room a classic of true crime writing-”Terrifying, engrossing, inspirational, and surprisingly funny,” said Kirkus Reviews. Focusing on the passionate teamwork and rivalries of three great detectives-a forensic psychologist, a forensic artist, and private eye-The Murder Room is “flat-out fantastic,” said Jeff Leen of The Washington Post, as it “treats murder and the investigation of it as not just a science but an art-strange, full of wonder, terrifying, and exhilarating…an odyssey of true crime that lends true grace to the genre.”
Born in Boston, Mike wrote more than fifty sports and human interest stories for his hometown newspaper, The Westwood Press, while still in high school, where he quit the basketball team to lead the school newspaper to recognition as the finest in New England. After graduating from Northwestern University, he was a reporter for two of the country’s most honored newspapers, The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Inspired by his mentor David Halberstam, his work won numerous writing awards including the National Headliner’s Award and the top prize from the Sunday Magazine Editor’s Association, and was nominated four times by the Inquirer for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. His 1992 profile of Henry Aaron for Sports Illustrated, “Prisoner of Memory,” won a National Association of Black Journalists’ prize for best writing about the African-American condition in American magazines over one million circulation. Both The Murder Room and Close to Shore were excerpted in Reader’s Digest, and Mike has also written for Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Figuring that humor writing was his greatest weakness he went on to disprove it by creating Wild Things, a nationally syndicated humor column about animals. Wild Things was published in forty newspapers with twenty million readers, won the major national awards for writing about animal welfare from the ASPCA in New York and the Humane Society of the United States in Washington, D.C., was collected into a Random House book, and led to three other books on animals, including the widely acclaimed Mutts: America’s Dogs. Mike’s mentor then was the late Roger Caras, who wrote in his book, The Bond: People and Their Animals, “Mike Capuzzo writes like an angel, and loves with a gentle intensity that’s awesome.” Finally, Mike won the, uh, Pawlitzer Prize-awarded by Alpo, for “humorous writing about Frisbee dogs.”
While writing The Murder Room, Mike and his wife Teresa Banik Capuzzo and their three dogs moved to Wellsboro, PA (pop. 3,000), where they started a free magazine, Mountain Home, that quickly grew from 0 to 100,000 readers. With a staff never larger than one full-time editorial person and small-town writers and eccentrics including a pastor, professor, yoga guru, fisherman, a woman in her mid-90s, and a suicidal hunter, Mountain Home has surpassed all newspapers in northern Pennsylvania and southern New York in readership, while winning two dozen prestigious state journalism awards against Philadelphia and Pittsburgh newspapers.
Mike’s national television and radio appearances include the NBC Today Show, CBS Evening News, Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor, multiple appearances on CNN, NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” “Weekend Edition,” “The Diane Rehm Show,” and “Fresh Air with Terry Gross,” and “The Howard Stern Show.”
