Review of If I Had My Druthers (Paperback)

This book is an interesting read and...
apparently the author is the step sister in law of Rick Springfield.She never mentions it specifically and calls the family Springthorpe but Rick's wife's father married the author's mother.

Product Description
On July 20, 1995, author Terri Austin Chiles received a call at work that she had been dreading-her mother, Amanda, is dying.

Amanda Fouther, a poor African American girl from Birmingham, Alabama, lived in a shack with her parents and seven siblings. Though she had very little going for her except charm, wit, and incredible good looks, she used these attributes to win a statewide beauty contest and college scholarship. This would be the first of many steps on a path filled with astonishing successes and devastating failures. But Amanda earned her doctorate degree and raised three children, including Chiles, who became a prominent Wall Street attorney.

As Chiles endures a painful divorce and struggles to maintain financial stability, she makes sure that the well-being of her children is her highest priority. Drawing on everything she learned from her mother, Chiles obtains a small but affordable apartment and enrolls her children in the best school in Manhattan. Through all of life's difficulties, it is the values and lessons instilled by Chiles's mother that give her the strength to keep going.

This captivating memoir includes letters and journal entries that provide a poignant tribute to Amanda's memory.

About the Author
Terri Austin Chiles, an attorney in New York City, has practiced law for more than twenty years. She received a law degree and a master's in journalism from Columbia University. She currently lives in Westchester, New York, with her husband and their children.

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Review of Road to Baghdad: Behind Enemy Lines: The Adventures of an American Soldier in the Gulf War (Mass Market Paperback)

Truth really can be stranger than fiction--and better reading, as well.Colonel Stanton's very impressive, highly readable memoir of his extraordinary adventures prior to and during the first Gulf War is a remarkable book--both for its ability to capture the inventive nature and casual courage of our finest military officers and for its ability to tell a thrilling personal story in a way that is neither bragging (too often a fault with first-person accounts) or pretentious.Stanton has the gift of telling a story straight and letting events speak for themselves.His experiences when stranded in Kuwait City during the opening phase of Iraq's invasion--when he kept an open line to U.S. authorities for days and reported directly from the Iraqi headquarters in his hotel--might have made a fine story in themselves, while revealing much about the Iraqi military's hidden weaknesses.His follow-on adventures as a prisoner-of-not-quite-war, absolutely true and corroborated, are better than the stuff of classic adventure novels.And he made it back to friendly lines in time to fight Desert Storm.This is a splendid military tale, well-told, of adventures that rival the great old military narratives from the Middle East, whether of Gordon Pasha, Lawrence or Wingate.And it's enormous fun to read, while making it very clear how we were able to defeat the Iraqis so handily.As this review is written, Colonel Stanton, whom I am privileged to have met as a consequence of my own military service, has served on the ground in our second Iraq war and is now in Baghdad, working on the reconstruction of Iraq.He's a soldier's soldier--and a superb storyteller.This book could not be more timely.The next time you feel the impulse to pick up a fictional thriller, skip it and read Stanton's book.It's more exciting--and it's true.Destined to become a modern military classic!



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Review of A Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina (Hardcover)

Ian McNulty's debut is a must read for those who wondered what New Orleans was really like after Katrina once you go beyond Jazz Fest and the Mardi Gras floats and the sporadic coverage that the recovery has received in the last few years.With a true feel for the grittiness and beauty peeking out from the rubble, McNulty captures a sense of New Orlean's anguish and struggle to rebuild.Most of all, he imparts to the reader a sense of how lonely, sad, depressing and desperate life was for the year following Katrina, and how ordinary people faced with extraordinarily daunting circumstances can huddle together in the dark and share some small piece of happiness.I guarantee you will read it in one sitting and laugh and cry while you do.

Product Description
For many months after Hurricane Katrina, life in New Orleans meant negotiating streets strewn with debris and patrolled by the United States Army. Most of the city was without power. Emptied and ruined houses, businesses, schools, and churches stretched for miles through once thriving neighborhoods.

Almost immediately, however, die-hard New Orleanians began a homeward journey. A travelogue through this surreal landscape, A Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina offers a deeply intimate, firsthand account of that homecoming. After the floodwaters drained, author Ian McNulty returned to live on the second floor of his wrecked house without electricity or neighbors. For months his sanity was writing this book on a laptop by candlelight.

By turns haunting, inspiring, and darkly comic, this memoir offers a behind-the-headlines story of resilience and renewal. From bittersweet camaraderie in the wreckage to depression and violent rampages in the lawless night to the first flickers of cultural revival and the explosive joy of a post-Katrina Mardi Gras, A Season of Night delivers an unprecedented tale from the wounded but always enthralling Crescent City.

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Review of Special Agent: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI (Hardcover)

This is the most inspiring book I have read about a woman's career since I became familiar with Ms. Jane Goodall's books about her pioneering work in Africa with chimpanzees.

Many people will see Ms. Candice ("don't call me Candy") De Long as a real-life Clarice Starling (the FBI agent in Hannibal).I think she is more impressive than that.This fascinating book recounts her three lives as a psychiatric nurse who worked with violent patients and did home health care for poor people, an FBI special agent (specializing in profiling of repeated, sexually violent offenders) from 1980 through 2000, and as a divorced mother raising a son alone.Each side of her life is equally impressive, and she is the kind of person we all should admire.She has always done her duty, and we are all the better for that.While many pioneering women in "men's" professions often were given "token" roles, Ms. De Long wanted and went to where the action was.During her career, she rescued a child from a pedophile abductor, captured a terrorist who had murdered three men, and caught a Class A fugitive.She was also present and part of many famous investigations.Her memoir will give you a much better idea about crime and how the FBI and DEA combat it.The book also contains many lessons for how women and children can avoid becoming crime victims.

When J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, there were no women field agents.By 1980, around 4 percent of the agents were women.At her retirement in 2000, this had risen to 15 percent.Ms. De Long sacrificed a lot to become an agent.She had to leave her young son for 16 weeks for the initial training.She missed a lot of evenings and weekends with him to do surveillance.The training included a lot of harrassment (female and general).For example, she was made to fire a shotgun so often in one day that she developed a permanent injury that kept her from being able to use that shoulder for firing a shotgun again.Another time, she had to box a large man who knocked her out cold.Her starting salary was half what she had made as a nurse.She could accept that."I wanted to lead a heroic life."She certainly did succeed in that objective.She took the men on at their own game, and was proud of being called one of the "b_____s with badges."Her signature was the fedora she always wore at the Bureau.

Some of the famous cases she worked on included the Tylenol tampering, being part of the surveillance team on the Unabomber leading up to the arrest of Ted Kaczynski, and the brothel closings in Chicago.

She correctly says relatively little about her personal life.But some of the anecdotes will keep you laughing for days.When she was asked to be a hot dog mother in her son's third grade class, the children noticed that she was packing.She got a lot more respect after that, and was invited back to talk about her work.Another time, she accidentally noticed a surveillance suspect while driving around and tailed her.The team had lost the suspect.Only well into the chase did she realize that her son was in the back seat.She kept him safe while her eye was peeled on the suspect.

The profiling work will intrigue you.You will learn about all of the different kinds of creeps who victimize women and children.It was amazing how well the profiles predicted who the guilty party was.Using the profiles allowed the FBI and local police to find the suspects much faster than would otherwise have occurred.Since these are repeat offenders, lives were saved and injuries were avoided as a result.Part of the worst of this was that many times the women could have been saved if someone had called the police."If you are ever assaulted, never count on help."

The stories of the harrassment she endured from insecure males in the FBI will amaze you.She indicates that conditions improved over time.One of the most ridiculous examples was when she was sent to the home of an informant to babysit his child while the bust went down.She put up with this only because the safety of an innocent child was involved.

I was even more impressed by her work as a psychiatric nurse.Shooting tranquilizers into writhing, distrubed patients being held down by 7 orderlies was probably more dangerous than any of the arrests she did for the FBI.There she had a gun and usually lots of backup.

Her courage was most impressive.When she arrested the terrorist, she kept waiting for her partner to put the cuffs on while she had the drop on the suspect.Eventually, she looked around and realized that her partner was sheepishly waiting in the car calling for back-up.In her haste to make the bust, she didn't take time to put on her bullet-proof vest.Fortunately, the error did not lead to harm, but she took a grave risk in the process.She was astonished to find that the terrorist was more frightened of her than she was of him.

Money problems eventually caused to need to moonlight as a nurse.The moonlighting stories are very entertaining.At first, she kept bumping into agents while she was working the wards.To avoid this, she started doing home nursing in the poorest neighborhoods.This dual career eventually led to her needing to retire in the middle of administrative hearings about whether she was being unprofessional in her moonlighting.Someone should have cut her more slack.

I was impressed by her courage, her idealism, her persistence, and her commitment to doing the right thing.I hope that all young women (and their parents) who are thinking about taking on a dangerous career will read this book.You will be very inspired.

My hat's off to you, Ms. De Long!You're way more than a five star person.

Ms. De Long and Ms. Petrini have done a fine job of writing about this fascinating life, and you will enjoy what they have to say.

After you finish reading this book, I suggest that you rethink your ideas about what women and men can and cannot do.This book once again proves that anyone can do anything, if they want to badly enough.

Live up to your potential to serve others!



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