5 comments about How Tough Could It Be?: The Trials and Errors of a Sportswriter Turned Stay-at-Home Dad.

1. This book reminded me of when PJ O'Rourke used to be funny and right wing (regrettably, now he's just well, right wing). His riff on the outrageous gift practices of the 00's suburbs is hysterical. While the role shifting is amusing, more compelling are Murphy's wry observations of parents in Marin and is transferable to Bronxville, Ridgewood, Grosse POinte. As someone trying to raise two children in this environment, this was a real sanity check. A laugh on almost every page and extremely well written.



2. I had purchased this book with eager anticipation. I too am a stay at home dad. There are a few humorous moments but on the whole this fellow is a brainless, selfish twit and his wife sounds like a complete ice queen. They both come across as incredibly selfish people. They are not a team, they don't work as a family. "It's all about me "is the central message in this book. Their kids are complete undisciplined brats- courtesy of the parents. How they stay married is a mystery.
   
   sadly... not worth your time although there were moments when it was a fun read. But not many.



3. I LOVED this book and have given it to many as a baby gift or just because gift. It really helped me see that I was over achieving in the household and my husband was underachieving. After we both read this book, we had a heart to heart that was much lighter and productive than the vent session I'd rehearsed for weeks prior. It really helped me lighten up and helped my husband see he needed to step up to the plate. Highly recommend.



4. This is a writer who decides to stay home for 6 months with the kids - I think just for the purpose of writing a book and making money. If he really wanted to "be there" for his kids, why didn't he scale back on his career long-term?
   
   There are a couple of funny moments in the book, but nothing all that interesting.



5. Beautifully written and laugh out loud funny at the same time. I'm going to get this book for friends and family. (No, I'm not being paid by the author, I'm not related to him, and, in fact, I don't know him at all - except from the book)

No comments about Fear and Loathing in America.

No comments about Carnage, Cops And Deadlines.

No comments about Edgar Snow: A Biography.

5 comments about Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn.

1. Considering that Emily Hahn wrote 52 books and countless articles and short stories--her career at the New Yorker alone spanned 68 years--and generated plenty of controversy both in her personal life as well as her writing, it's amazing that few people have heard of this unique woman. She was born in 1905, when women's place was in the home, so she found plenty of ways to shock people. In fact, she enjoyed doing it. Hahn took words like "no," "can't," and "shouldn't" as a personal challenge to prove that she could and she would. Without a doubt, Hahn was a remarkable woman who was clearly ahead of her time. Cuthbertson's well-done autobiography of this exotic one-time Shanghai resident allows us to enjoy a wild romp through Hahn's life story.
   
   Even during girlhood, Hahn showed that a propensity to break rules and to write would shape her future. She majored in engineering, despite the unpopularity it caused her. After graduation, Hahn refused to marry. She had too many other things she wanted to do, and she freely admitted that she hated housework. After a stint as an engineer, Hahn worked as a waitress and then a tour guide in Santa Fe for a few years. In 1928, her parents bribed her to come back north and try again by offering to pay her way through graduate school. So, Hahn attended graduate school at Columbia University. While in New York, a friend asked her to cover a journalism assignment for him. Her career as a writer was launched.
   
   Always living on the edge, Emily's next project was a satirical "how to" handbook on the art of seduction--certainly a subject nice young ladies should know nothing about! Hahn then moved in with a male friend, Davey Loth, and bought a Capuchin monkey. She loved to amuse herself by watching people's reactions as she went around the city with "Punk" proudly perched on her shoulder.
   
   Despite seeming to be on the road to success, Hahn succumbed to the family propensity for depression and attempted suicide in 1929. That, however, was probably also on the list of requirements for an artistic temperament. To recover, Hahn decided to move to London with her former male roommate, Loth. Though she loved spending time in the British Museum reading room helping Loth with research for a book he was writing, she readily became bored with London and decided to visit her old friend Patrick Putnam, who was a Harvard-trained anthropologist now working in the Belgian Congo. Of course a young lady traveling alone to Africa raised many eyebrows, as did her shipboard drinking contests with Corsican soldiers. Once she arrived in Africa, the journey she endured to Patrick's village would have daunted even the heartiest male travelers.
   
   Emily remained in the Belgian Congo for nearly two years, learning Swahili and paying for her living expenses by working as a nursing assistant at the hospital in Patrick's village. Naturally, her African experiences led to a book, which she called Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North.
   
   After returning to London, Emily began an affair with the already-married Edwin Mayer --a founder of MGM Studios. When that relationship ended, she decided to put the past behind her by going abroad again. This time, she decided to try Shanghai, which was "the place to be" in the 1930s. Jobs were plentiful, and many foreigners were able to live a lifestyle they could only dream of back home. Shanghai was also China's cultural and intellectual center, which suited Hahn, as she became part one of the socially hip. One of the highlights of this period was the time she posed nude for Sir Victor Sassoon. Before the local gossips had finished wagging about this event, Hahn stunned everyone by beginning a relationship with a man who was not only married but Chinese. Interracial relationships were highly taboo, but Hahn felt drawn Sinmay Zau not only because he was forbidden, but because he was a poet, an intellectual, and a publisher. Unfortunately, he was also an opium addict, who initiated Emily's battle with the drug. Smoking opium, however, fit her concept of herself as an artist. She thought the drug was exotic, daring, and romantic.
   
   Despite her opium addiction, her busy social life, and her scandalous affair, Hahn managed to remain highly productive during these years. She wrote for local English language publications and The New Yorker, she taught, and she worked on her next book, Affair. One of the more interesting series of articles she created during this period concerned a Chinese gentleman called Pan Heh-ven, who was based on Zau. Through Zau, Hahn gained an intimate view of Shanghainese life that few other outsiders could observe, or would dare to participate in.
   
   Hahn enjoyed her notoriety, but to ensure that the gossips had enough material, she adopted Mr. Mills, a pet gibbon she often took around with her. The naughty Mr. Mills was not very popular with Hahn's neighbors, but she enjoyed the boost it gave her colorful persona.
   
   In the fall of 1937, the Japanese took over Shanghai, threatening to put an end to Hahn's exotic escapades. She had just begun to write a book on the infamous Soong sisters, which became her most recognized work. She was excited about the project as it would be a reason to kick her opium habit and to break off her relationship with Zau. Because of the political situation, however, Hahn decided to actually marry Zau. Since he already had a wife, she would become a concubine. This move actually turned out to be less insane than it appeared to outsiders. Among several reasons, this strange union turned beneficial for her later, as being married to a Chinese allowed her to avoid being interned during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong.
   
   Following her "marriage" to Zau, Hahn went to Hong Kong to work on the Soong book, where she met 36-year-old British army intelligence officer Charles Boxer. Boxer was unhappily married to a wife who had been evacuated to Australia when he began an affair with Hahn. This was disgraceful enough behavior for an officer, but it became scandalous when he wanted to have a child with Emily. At age 35, Hahn assumed she might never get another chance, and she had been told by a Shanghai doctor that probably could not conceive. Since she had been told "no,"... well, by 1941 she was pregnant.
   
   Just imagine the rumor mill: a former opium addict, a Chinaman's concubine, who goes around with a gibbon on her shoulder and smoking cigars, refuses to leave Japanese occupied Hong Kong, and who was now pregnant by a married British officer! Inarguably, Hahn was living life fully and on her own terms.
   
   Hahn was teaching and writing in Hong Kong when baby Carola was born in October 1941. When the Japan attacked in December, it was too late to evacuate. After all the deprivations of war, Hahn returned to the States to discover that her bank account was flush with the royalties from The Soong Sisters and Mr. Pan. She was full of creative energy after her experiences. One of the first projects she completed was penning China to Me. Not everyone appreciated her honesty about her experiences or her views on China's political situation, but again she received mountains of publicity and provided ample fodder for drawing room gossips. She also became a regular contributor at The New Yorker. During this prolific outpouring, she was spinning out articles on a variety of subjects, earning $2,000 per article at a time when the average factory worker earned $1,700 per year. Not bad for a single mother who was only recently a half-starved, penniless refugee!
   
   After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Boxer made his way to New York and married Hahn, but naturally their marriage was anything but ordinary. After the wedding, the family of three made their home at Boxer's family estate in England. While Boxer felt at home as a "country gentleman," burying himself in his research and working at his dream job as a Professor of Portuguese History and Literature at King's College at U of London, Hahn rapidly grew bored. After giving birth to baby Amanda in October 1948, she accepted her dream job on the staff of The New Yorker. She seems to have invented the "commuter marriage" as she divided her time between the two continents for the rest of her life.
   
   For the next 40 years, Hahn indulged her natural curiosity by writing about everything, and she thrived on the stimulation of being a writer in New York City. In her work, as in her personal life, she sought to be unpredictable. In some ways her career was harmed because she moved so effortlessly, and frequently, among genres. As a result, editors did not know how to market her work and publishers seemed at a loss as to how to promote an Emily Hahn book, as her work could not be categorized. Readers, however, liked her eye for intriguing detail and her casual perspective on life in a convention-bound era. When she died in 1997, Hahn was 92 years old, still busily tapping out articles on her trusty typewriter.
   
   Cuthbertson has done a fine job researching Hahn's life and making her story come to life in the pages of "Nobody Said Not to Go." The book is easy to read and inspires readers to explore Hahn's work. Was she simply born to be outrageous? Did declaring herself an "artistic personality" give her a license to do as she pleased? Does she deserve to rank among the best writers of her generation? As Hahn's work has been largely forgotten, the tantalizing answers are happily left for us to discover.



2. I knew nothing about Emily Hahn and I picked this book up being intrigued by a synopsis. It is a very well written book about an extraordinary life. Emily (Mickey) Hahn broke every convention of her time: a woman who studied mining engineering in collage, a lone white woman in Africa in the early 1930's, a single woman in China, an American "married" to a Chinese as his concubine and a journalist caught in the Japanese invasion of that country. Hopefully, I have said enough to tickle the interest of would-be readers since I don't want to give away any more.

   This is a life story that reads like a novel. Why the Chinese portion of this book has not been made into a movie is a surprise to me. There is a cinematic quality of Ms. Hahn's life in China (which she wrote about herself) that cries out for filming. Ken Cuthbertson tells the story of this life without judgement calls does not clutter his book with useless facts. The book is illustrated with photographs spread throughout the chapters where they are needed. I could not recommend this book more highly.




3. Ah, Emily! It is perhaps appropriate that Emily Hahn was friends with Chinese writer and Kuomintang spy Lin Yutang, who despite his dubious politics was a fantastic philosopher and writer. Among his best known works was "The Art of Living," and Emily Hahn could serve as the poster girl for the Western version of his ideals.

   Her mythology is well known, although not as well as it deserves to be: she elbowed her way into a male-only university department, lived alone in New York, and drove cross-country with a girlfriend in a time when such things Just Weren't Done. Once she'd exhausted the adventurous possibilities of North America, she struck out for Africa and then China.

   She was a bohemian in Shanghai, and her flat enjoyed visits from even a grubby, earnest young Mao Zedong and the ever-dapper Zhou Enlai. Unlike other China Hands, though, Hahn mainly shied from revolutionary company in favor of the decidedly bourgeois literati, led by handsome dandy poet Shao Xunmei. (Read "Shanghai Modern" for more on him.) Hahn became Shao's lover and later concubine, and together they launched the literary magazine Tianxia, "Under Heaven". Emily was also a fixture in the expatriate scene, writing for the New Yorker and known for showing up at Victor Sassoon's lavish parties with a pet baboon in tow, clad in diapers after a few unfortunate mishaps.

   She moved with the war to Chongqing, and from there to Hong Kong, where she began an indiscret affair and had an illegitimate child with the head of British Secret Services. She sat out the Japanese occupation, returned to the States after the war ended, and then moved with her lover to England.

   Emily Hahn was more a writer and professional character than a journalist. Her best works are autobiographical, and when she ventured into research the result was painfully propagandistic puff pieces.

   But that is the problem with this biography: Emily Hahn's life had already been documented with both care and color in her own writings, so Cuthbertson's account mostly rehashes Emily's own words in more prosaic terms. The main advantage is to find out the historical characters behind the fictional names, and to have a clearer chronology than Hahn's writing provides.

   The thing is, Emily Hahn didn't lead that interesting or colorful or significant a life, not compared to the many other young Americans lured to the East at the same time. Rather, she was so talented at describing people, places, events with a sharply bemused eye for the ironic idiosyncracy. That is what makes her intriguing.




4. While I don't necessarily agree that Emily Hahn has been forgotten (see, for instance, Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific) I do believe that a biography about her helps us to understand the complexities of women's lives in the 20th century. Ken Cuthbertson has done a competent job of outlining Hahn's life and his prose is just about as lively as her adventures. However, I think his historical analysis is weak, especially in the matter of feminism, which was so controversial during Hahn's lifetime. Putting her life in sharper perspective with the historical times would have made this a fuller biography. But for people who don't really care about that, they will certainly enjoy the retelling of Hahn's fast-paced life and may even be motivated to dig up some of Hahn's own books.



5. What a demand Emily Hahn had for authentic experiences and stimulating people! Her parents must have had sleepless nights wondering how their daughteer could survive her current situation and what she would what do or say next. Thanks to author Ken Cuthbertson, who tempted me away from hiking in New Mexico to hang around the hotel finishing his book. He was able to describe a person with whom I would love to have dinner and hate to work. Now I'm ready to read anything he writes: John Gunther's biography, grocery lists, whatever.

5 comments about Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public.

1. Ted Koppel is quite eloquent and has many interesting views but the audiobook (unabridged) lacks any deep and profound views or analysis. Nevertheless, well read and not boring. Good for long drives or plane flights, especially now that it is selling at a discount price.



2. Nightline anchor and legendary tele-journalist Ted Koppel set out on January 1, 1999 with an interesting idea. He would write one entry per day in a diary that would record the events in his own life and in the world around him.
   
   Admirable.
   
   Koppel's notes on the goings-on in 1999 seem oddly distant in this post-911 world of 2005. Was the last year of the century just passed really quite as innocent as it seems in this record of a journalist and his travels across the world? That was the biggest point of notice I came away with from this remarkable read: exactly how much our society and the greater world has altered in so small a time.
   
   That said, it is still worthwhile to read through Koppel's thoughts on the happenings of that year and to gain perspective on all that went on in a top-ranking network journalist's life. In those twelve months, Koppel traveled to at least four continents, met with dozens of noteworthies, and also managed to fit in time at home, where he tells us of the joys of something small like a redecorating project after having spent so many of the previous weeks in and out of war zones, jets, vans, and studios. Koppel is never shy about giving his opinion and sometimes I admired his views, at other times he frankly ticked me off. That's probably someplace in his job description.
   
   I've heard Ted Koppel is retiring soon, and I wonder if he intends to devote more time to writing once his days in front of the camera are done? If this book is any indication of what that output might be, then I hope so.



3. Ted Koppel's Off Camera is a caring and informative view into just that, his thoughts and daily activities off camera. Mr Koppel provides us daily journal entries from the year 1999. From Monica to the strains of reporting from Kosovo. I loved reading this book.



4. My first thought in his first couple entries was that he was trying a little to hard to be funny ala Dennis Miller or Jay Leno. However, then I realized that he wasn't, he was just blurting out his thoughts from each day (and almost every day).

   I feel there was not much cohesion throughout the book. He spends a lot of time on the war in Kosovo, as that was a big event during that year. However, he puts in little tidbits about his growing up and his new house or something irrelevant. Even though it was meant to be his personal thoughts on various topics, I felt he should have organized the material a little bit.

   On the good side, it was interesting hearing about the difficulties of being a reporter during the war, and getting some of that insider information. Similarly, it was interesting hearing his perspective from having been around for a while in the journalism business.

   Overall, I made it through the whole book, but every once in a while while listening to it (Audio CD version), I would think, "Now why did he include that?" I feel this work could have been improved through some editting and some thoughtful exclusions or reorganization of the material.




5. ...The dust cover should be a clue that this book is trivial. Here is Koppel, wearing a leather jacket and holding a stick. If that photo interests you, you will love this book. It is filled with self-indulgent information about Koppel and his grandchildren. It would have been a better book, perhaps, had Koppel chosen to write about the leather jacket and the stick.
   Readers who are able to overlook Koppel's arrogance will find little insight into international events. First, these events are quite dated. Kosovo, Monica and Viagra are not fresh, riveting subjects. Secondly, Koppel doesn't have the time to give us thoughtful insight. He appears to be jotting down a few bedtime thoughts about his day. And so often his predictions and views of current events prove wrong.
   What I came away with is the realization that much of our daily news stories are fleeting, insignificant events. ...

5 comments about Walking Broad: Looking for the Heart of Brotherly Love.

1. I truly don't know why the author didn't just say 'Philly Sucks' and be done with it. Why drag it on and on the way he did? I couldn't get past the 3rd chapter of this hatchet-job, lousy book. Hey Buschel, you owe me $18.00!!! What an utter waste of paper. Just Awful!!!



2. This book range true to me, an ex-Philadelphian who chafed at its parochialism while I lived there but who remembers with fondness the city's refusal refusal to change its small-town mindset.
   
   I was there when Sally Starr and Gene London ruled TV, when Jerry Blavet and WFIL ruled the music scene, when Richie Allen became Dick Allen, when Rizzo was a character in "Doonesbury", when Rocky was installed at the Art Museum, and when the Phillies won the World Series; ah, good times. Then Wilson Goode bombed MOVE, I graduated from college, and left for New York. It was time to move for me, too.
   
   Any Philadelphian who was in the city in the 60s, 70s, and 80s will recognize the Philly Bruce Buschel remembers and discovers in this book, but Buschel and his brother are funnier than I and my friends could ever be. His transliteration of the Philly accent is pitch-perfect (Chapter 3), and he gets the defiant "We're not NY and we're not DC and we don't care" addytood of the natives just right (every chapter).
   
   I visited Philly in 2005 and was surprised that it finally did something with the waterfront. The historic area is unequal in its treasures (don't miss Elfreth Alley!) and will raise a lump in your throat with pride at what happened here. Sterile Veteran's Stadium has been razed and the Phillies now lose in a wonderful new old-fashioned stadium. Visit!
   
   But read this book before you go. You'll learn how people in Philly coped with living amid reminders that your hometown used to be the most important place in the colonies, but lost something somewhere for some reason. You learn to ignore the bad and shrug off the absurd, and the only thing that really matters is where the best cheesesteak is made. That's Philly, to me.



3. It's clearly the best thing ever written about Philadelphia, as it finally locates the city not as some colonial relic at the confluence of two rivers, or as a culturally ineffectual grid between D.C. and NYC, but as an urban metaphysic that tracks from north to south along the unique spine that is Broad Street, the spine that supports and defines all Philadelphians' relationship to the city, to themselves, and to each other.
   --Matt Damsker, former arts critic for the L.A. Times and Hartford Courant
   
   Like the Phillies, Walking Broad will bring you great joy and then break your heart. --Steven Levy, Newsweek writer
   
   Interviews with quirky Philadelphia characters aren't unexpected in a book subtitled "Looking for the Heart of Brotherly Love." Nor are evocative descriptions of the urban landscape. What does surprise about Buschel's chronicle is its complexity and elegance. His walk down Broad serves a larger psychic purpose. As Buschel concedes, the plan to find oneself by walking Broad Street can be "baby boomer perdition or Walt Whitman rapture." I tore through Walking Broad and laughed at almost every page. That I was pissed off when I put it down is a testament to how rich it is.
   --Liz Spikol, Philadelphia Weekly
   
   Walking Broad is a 13-mile journey filled with personal insights, a joyous overview, and a Marx Brothers attitude.
   --Robert Downey, a Prince and a Filmmaker
   
   
   In this charming book, Bruce Buschel returns home to the Philly of his youth to look back and remember those times of yore. Walking down the city's main drag, Broad Street, Buschel not only
   recollects the stories that defined him, he goes on to examine the soul of the city and the evolution that continues to change it to this day. Laced with humor and full of heart, Walking Broad
   is at once a history of a city and a passionate declaration of love to the place he called home.
   --The Strand Bookstore
   
   This painfully honest and blunt memoir reveals how Buschel's love-hate relationship with the city is inextricably connected to his painful Broad Street youth: the death of his father when Buschel was three, his troubled relationship with his hard-working and hard-drinking mother and the abuse he suffered after being sent at age seven to a city boarding school for orphans.
   --Publisher's Weekly
   
   Buschel is an amusing companion who successfully avoids the folksy lovability of, say, Studs Terkel. But ultimately, Walking Broad is not so much a coherent whole as a series of entertaining pit stops. Then again, as he might say, so is Philadelphia.
   --Los Angeles Times
   
   A gem. Very Philly. And great fun--jaunty, highly engaging, fast but never superficial.
   --Tim Whitaker, Philadelphia Weekly editor



4. Walking Broad is yet another contribution to the ever-growing literary genre that consists of gratuitous and unwarranted attacks against the city of Philadelphia. Sure Philadelphia has its faults, but Buschel focuses on Philadelphia's faults to the exclusion of its many merits. Any person who reads this book and lives in and loves Philadelphia will at some point have the urge to punch this hack in the gut.
   
   Buschel's book is based on his hypothetical stroll down Broad Street which serves as a very loose framework for him to tie together an unending and largely unrelated string of hackneyed attacks that consist of an exaggeration of every Philadelphia stereotype ever foisted upon the city and its residents.
   
   He is so consumed by his desire to attack Philadelphia, he even makes up facts. For instance, in to further his attempt to color Philadelphia with the brush of institutional racism, he writes that the Phillies - as the last all-white team in baseball - won the World Series in 1950. As any person who follows Philadelphia sports - he claims to be such a person - should know, the Phillies did not win a World Series in 1950. In fact, they won their FIRST and ONLY World Series in 1980.
   
   Buschel plays fast and loose with facts about the City he claims to love in a naked attempt to exorcise his own personal demons left-over from a very, very troubled youth. Whatever his personal history, it does not justify the mean-spirited gonzo-journalism perpetrated by this garbage.
   
   Sadly, people who are not familiar with Philadelphia will read this book and assume that the author has penned an accurate portrayal of Philadelphia. In their mind, this book will confirm the worst stereotypes Philadelphia has to offer. And that's just too bad. Because Philadelphia has a lot going for it - especially if the city could shake free from all the stereo-types foisted upon it by the likes of Buschel.



5. He captures the great and not so great things about this city that only an insider that loves Philly can do. Honest, funny and compasionate.

3 comments about Nothing to Declare: A Memoir.

1. Not Reading Gaol.
   
   This is a wonderful book about Taki's period as a guest of Her Majesty. For those looking for prison memoirs, read "Nothing to Declare" and Jim Goad's "S**t Magnet" for contrasting tales told with amusement and panache. Throw in "manchild in the Promised Land" in you want another colourful voice.
   
   Reading Taki is like a good tennis game with an attractive partner, a warm summer afternoon in beautiful surroundings, and a perfect cocktail answer to the slur of Eurotrash. Taki is glamour without the glitz, wealth combined with anonymity, privilege and comfort without meterosexual softness, and manliness without burlesque or misogyny.
   
   An unapologetic elitist gentleman, ever giving communists and the spineless a fair punch in their clownish noses. Pure delight.



2. A great book, maybe a little slow at the end. If you like Taki, I highly reccomend this collection of his writings.



3. After seeing the film, 'American History X', I was hooked on finding out about what it's really like in a prison without the added drama of films. Taki gives an honest, undramatised description of his short time in prison for attempted drug smuggling. He explains the torment of being alone and not being able to walk around freely, 24 hours a day, as well the the disgusting conditions prisoners may put up with. It was certainly different to the the image that films like 'shawshank' gave. It showed the human side of prisoners as well as the goodness that the guards were capable of. It also gave interesting descriptions of the social code that inmates followed. For example the unspoken rule that a prisoner never uses the lavatory when the other prisoner is present, as this is 'home'. A recommended read to anyone interested in prison and the loyalty inmates share.

No comments about Inside Story.

1 comments about Combat Reporter: Don Whitehead's World War II Diary And Memoirs.

1. Edited by University of Tennessee-Knoxville teacher John B. Romeiser, Combat Reporter: Don Whitehead's World War II Diary and Memoirs is the true story of two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Don Whitehead, who served the Associated Press in 1942 by covering the Allied drive against Erwin Rommel's tanks in North Africa, in Whitehead's own words. Collecting and organizing Whitehead's personal journal and unfinished memoir with the rare editor's note in brackets for clarity, Combat Reporter covers events that Whitehead witnessed from 1942-1943 in Cairo, Libya, Tunisia, and Sicily. Combat Reporter offers an evenhanded, front-lines view of the European Theater and an unforgettable self-portrait of a one-of-a-kind reporter. A foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Atkinson and an afterword by Whitehead's colleague Command Sergeant Major Benjamin Franklin (U.S. Army, Ret.) round out this highly recommended memoir.