Podcast Review: Broken Record (Pushkin).

I’ve been hoping to write a review of a podcast for some time, but recently thought it would be best to write about a single episode that I found compelling in and of itself, rather than just endorsing a particular podcast series.

However, I haven’t found that much time for listening to a lot of podcasts lately (especially since I don’t commute to work anymore), and in general have found that when I do, the quality and my interest in the topics from episode to episode tends to vary a great deal within any given series, even with some of the best and most informative news series I’ve found, such as Ezra Klein’s The Ezra Klein Show (New York Times News), Chris Hayes’ Why Is This Happening? (MSNBC), and Rachel Maddow’s recent MSNBC podcast history, ULTRA, about an earlier radical right upsurge in our national history.

Despite my intention to focus on a single episode of a series for my first podcast review, then, I was surprised to realize that I am now most eager to share a review of an entire podcast series, rather than a single episode. Of course, it too has the same problem of inconsistent topics and variable interest-levels as any other series with many episodes, but at least with this one, it’s pretty easy to guess which episodes you want to hear just by looking at the list of people interviewed.

This podcast series from Pushkin, which I have listened to on a number of recent airline flights, is called Broken Record. It is a collaborative effort of the popular writer Malcolm Gladwell, the famous music producer Rick Rubin, longtime Canadian journalist and New York Times media critic Bruce Headlam, and NPR arts reporter and show producer Justin Richmond.

The format and purpose of the podcast series is very simple. In various combinations, one or several of the four hosts conduct in-depth, often fascinating personal interviews with individual popular musicians.

In many cases, the interviewer(s) bring not only their own extensive knowledge of the music and arts industries and communities, the work of the artist being interviewed, and their own individual expertise and enthusiasm to bear, but also sometimes personal relationships, shared history or real friendships with the artists, which shapes the tone of the interview and the questions they ask.

This is particularly evident in interviews conducted by Rick Rubin, whose wide-ranging career in music production has put him in the studio at some point, working with many of the major artists he now interviews. I previously reviewed McCartney 3-2-1, a video documentary of Rubin interviewing Paul McCartney in a spare and darkened recording studio. The Broken Record podcast interviews he conducts have a very similar flavor, without the video aspect, as he goes in-depth with the artists into the music creation process, the history, the stories and the emotions of the musicians when they were creating their epic tunes.

Rubin also appears prominently in Somewhere You Feel Free, the Tom Petty YouTube documentary I just reviewed this morning, both as a contemporary commentator and also in the archival films from the Wildflower recording sessions era, in which he was present in his role as a music producer. He’s really like the Forrest Gump of music producers of our times, because of the vast range of the types of successful music and musicians he’s recorded and produced, which makes him an outstanding and well-informed interviewer for these sorts of conversations.

Of course, Malcolm Gladwell is also a skilled and often-intriguing podcast host and conversationalist. He has his own long-running podcast on Pushkin, Revisionist History, in which he uses the same style of counter-intuitive thinking and probing common to his bestselling books to re-examine major historical situations that we all think we understand, but maybe don’t. He is also a big fan of music, culture and the arts, so his enthusiasm and constant curiosity shine through in his Broken Record interviews.

Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond are less well known to a mass audience than Gladwell and Rubin, but they also prove to be smart, enthusiastic music fans with great interviewing skills and the ability to relate easily to their subjects. In other words, it’s an all-star team of hosts.

If this sounds appealing, I suggest you find the series wherever you get your podcasts, and then peruse the episode list going back several years, to see which of your favorite musicians and artists have been interviewed.

One nice thing about this podcast is that the recency of the interviews isn’t nearly as important as it would be, for example, with a current-events or news-related podcast. You can listen to interviews from six months or two years ago, and they’re still fascinating even now, particularly since the conversations are frequently retrospective and historical in nature. These podcasts will hold up and remain interesting for a long time.

The thing I like the most about the series and the interviews is the nature of the discussions. In all the ones I’ve heard, you feel like you’re listening in to a rich, informative and very friendly conversation between real down-to-earth people, discussing topics, music and histories that are very personal to them, although frequently part of legends, careers and lives lived in the glare of spotlights and their celebrity.

During the past few flights I’ve taken, I’ve heard lively and revealing interviews on Broken Record with Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Michael Stipe (lead singer of R.E.M.), Stevie Van Zandt (Bruce Springsteen’s friend, E Street Band guitarist and actor), and a particularly interesting conversation with blues guitarist, singer and songwriter Bonnie Raitt, which made all that otherwise monotonous airline flight time go by so much more quickly.

I had also first heard much of the news about the Tom Petty Wildflowers album anniversary re-release last year (with all the supplemental recordings, discussed in today’s other review) from an excellent interview on Broken Record. That episode also was conducted by Rick Rubin, proving that these podcasts can be an excellent source of breaking music news and trends in the industry as well as merely historical and retrospective pieces with aging stars.

There are so many more artists’ interviews in this podcast series’ archives, and they’re not just old-time Baby Boomer favorites either. There are plenty of musicians from the grunge era of the 1990s, the first two decades of the 2000s, rockers and rappers, folk singers and R&B artists. You can pick and choose whose stories you’d most like to hear, although I can almost guarantee that you’d be entertained by many of the podcasts, and would learn something new and interesting, even if the interview is with an artist you don’t know very much (or even anything) about.

This podcast series is an excellent way to learn more about popular music, and the musicians who create it, while enjoying listening in to pleasant, friendly and revealing conversations between gifted interviewers and the talented musical stars who are their subjects. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers (2021). YouTube Documentary.

Hello again! It’s not even Christmas yet, and already I’m back from my reluctant but much-appreciated breather and short break from The Memory Cache. It was refreshing to take a break, and spend more than a week in Hawai’i with family and friends, with the trade winds blowing, warm weather every day, and gorgeous ocean views everywhere.  I took a helicopter tour of Maui, saw a sea turtle underwater at close range with my mask and snorkel on, went to the aquarium, and appreciated my life and my closest loved ones. It was wonderful.

This has been a surprisingly active bounce-back year for travel in our family, after the past two years of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. In October, my wife and I took a trip back east for a wedding in the Cleveland area, and then on to several family visits on the east coast. One fortuitous benefit of the Ohio visit, of particular interest here since it is once again Rock and Roll Friday on this blog (the fourth Friday of each month) was that we were able to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where we’d never been before.

It's a lovely museum, perfect for a lifelong popular music fan like me, with exhibits covering the entire history of rock since the late 1940s, including pictures, clothing, various rock stars’ guitars and other artifacts, and many explanatory articles and posters. 

The featured display at the time was one about the Beatles, tied to the recent Peter Jackson documentary about the making of the Let It Be album in 1969 (previously reviewed here), along with many other exhibits of interest, as well as mock-studio space where visitors can try playing instruments, and rocking out with a couple of on-site cover band musicians. It was a really fun museum, and if you’re ever in Cleveland, I highly recommend it. 

 

While I was there, I also saw a large poster for a new YouTube documentary I’d not heard about called Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers. It’s a movie that was released more or less contemporaneously with last year’s release of the “missing” Wildflowers recordings made by Tom Petty and his collaborators, including members of the Heartbreakers, the noted music producer Rick Rubin, and other musical luminaries such as Ringo Starr (from the Beatles) and Carl Wilson (from the Beachboys).

The movie itself is not overly long at a run time of about an hour and a half. Most of it was pieced together from recently discovered 16-mm film shot during the period of the Wildflowers album recording sessions, with supplemental interviews (from both then and now) and candid conversations with some of the principals, especially Petty’s close friend, sometimes co-songwriter and lead guitarist Mike Campbell, Heartbreaker pianist Benmont Tench, Rick Rubin, Petty’s now-adult daughters, and a few other cameos.

Several people in the film claimed that Tom Petty believed that the Wildflowers solo album was his greatest work and accomplishment. That message was pushed throughout the movie, as it was in the promotions for the anniversary release in 2021 of all the supplemental recordings from that period. The film makes very clear that it was a time of major growth, change and transition for Petty, both as an artist and as a person, which had impacts on the sorts of sounds he created, and on the artists around him who contributed to the work from this period.

I’m not personally convinced that this album contained the greatest songs of Tom Petty’s long and prolific career as a songwriter and recording artist. I’ve always felt that the heavily acoustic guitar-based sound of these recordings, and the deeply personal, often somewhat somber and depressive lyrics, were not nearly as compelling or exciting as much of the other classic rock material of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

A perfect example of this is shown in the film, with the story of a short "side" recording session Petty did with the Heartbreakers while he was mostly focused on recording his own solo album. The session was needed to record two new songs for the band's last album for MCA (which was otherwise intended to be a greatest hits collection), before entering a new contract with Warner Brothers. 

One of the two new “filler songs” for this MCA-produced Greatest Hits album that Petty quickly wrote (and the full Heartbreakers band recorded) was “Last Dance with Mary Jane” – a monster hit and perennial crowd pleaser, which I believe will forever dwarf almost all of the songs on Wildflowers in popularity, except perhaps “You Wreck Me”.

Nevertheless, whatever you might think of the Wildflowers album and this stage of Tom Petty’s career and life, the movie is a fascinating, informal view into the personality, relationships, creative processes, and artistic development of one of the greatest rock stars ever, at this one particular point in the long arc of his career.  

If you are at all curious about how top musicians write and craft their songs, and how their emotional states, random events and collaborations with other musicians and recording engineers shape the outcomes of their efforts, this documentary is a fascinating and unvarnished view into the creative processes of one of the world’s favorite and most legendary popular musicians. It's also essential viewing for die-hard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers fans. Recommended.

Personal Note: Taking an End of the Year Breather . . .

Hello, dear readers. You probably noticed that there’s been a longer-than-usual break since the most recent new review was posted here at The Memory Cache (on December 1st). 

As I’ve mentioned before, my general goal is to publish at least two or three short reviews each week, but as I approach the first anniversary of this blog (in February), after writing and publishing 250 posts in the first ten months, I've realized that it’s not always possible for me to maintain that pace on my own without a break, while also preserving the quality of life I want.

Family activities and responsibilities, frequent travel, the gradual resumption of our social life after three years of pandemic, and my musical projects are all taking more of my time and attention away from reading new books, and watching new shows, then sitting down to write about the ones I enjoyed. 

I’m beginning to realize that as we (and I) come out of the total isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic years (a period which contained very few distractions, or other demands on my time), I sometimes will need short vacations to relax and recharge, and to take time for reflection and other priorities, away from my now much-fuller daily schedule.

At this time of year, fortunately, most of you presumably also have plenty of other things on your mind, and hopefully plans to spend time with families and friends over the holidays. With that in mind, I wanted to let you know that I will only be posting a few more reviews between now and the end of this year.

I expect to come back up to speed again in January. Until then, please continue to check in periodically to see what’s new. I’ll be looking forward to the next year of writing and publishing The Memory Cache blog for your continuing enjoyment and information in 2023.

Wishing you and your families happy holidays, and a very happy New Year. 

Book Review: Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath (2022). Bill Browder.

In 2015, Bill Browder, a young businessman and major Western investor in Russia during the early post-Soviet era, published a bestselling autobiography called Red Notice (previously reviewed here). It described how his harrowing experiences in Russia at the hands of the Putin authoritarian and kleptocratic government had led him to become the chief advocate for the passage of The Magnitsky Act by Congress.

The Magnitsky Act was named for one of Browder’s Russian lawyers and friends who had been murdered in jail by the Putin government after being falsely accused of various financial crimes committed by members of Putin’s own circle. The act gives the U.S. government the legal authority to freeze and confiscate the funds of human rights abusers, and has been used extensively against Russian oligarchs, members of the Putin government, and other autocrats of the post-Soviet world, most recently in connection with the illegal Russian war in Ukraine.

Browder’s new book Freezing Order is the excellent and heart-pounding true life sequel to the story he began in Red Notice seven years ago. Red Notice ended with him having successfully worked with Congressional leaders from both parties to enact the Magnitsky Act, which immediately put him at the top of Vladimir Putin’s enemies list. Freezing Order picks up the story with Browder’s next efforts to convince the leaders of other governments around the world to pass their own versions of the Magnitsky Act in their countries.

Since February, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine, we have had an ongoing public demonstration of the types of terrorism and cold-blooded brutality that Vladimir Putin is willing and able to unleash against his enemies. But Browder has experienced it repeatedly in his own personal life, as close friends and associates were poisoned, imprisoned and murdered, and as he increasingly has had to dodge and counter personal attacks on himself, including disinformation campaigns, lawsuits, death threats, in absentia convictions in Russia for crimes falsely attributed to him, and Russian attempts to use Interpol and other dark operations to capture him and extradite him back to Russia.

In one of the most chilling personal accounts of the dangers posed by the presidency of Donald Trump, he recounts his fears of being arrested and shipped off to Russia by Trump when Putin proposed that very idea at the notorious 2017 Helsinki conference, as a “fair” response to the American indictment of twelve Russian agents by Robert Mueller. Browder also provides detailed accounts of his own relationship to and knowledge of numerous of the Russian bad actors eventually identified in the context of the strange Trump/Putin relationship and the Mueller investigation.

One of the most important points Browder makes is that Vladimir Putin loves money. In furtherance of those desires, Putin and his cronies for years have run sophisticated worldwide criminal operations to steal from their own people, confiscate the assets and proceeds of Russian companies under fraudulent pretexts, and then export and hide the vast amounts – Browder suggests over $1 trillion – via complex, sophisticated money laundering operations.

But as victims, journalists and western government investigators have increasingly exposed, and by use of Magnitsky Acts in many countries confiscated the fruits of this theft, Putin has felt increasingly threatened and frustrated by the outside world. Browder suggests that the growing effect of these confiscatory efforts against oligarchs and human rights abusers has played a large part in driving Putin to his desperate war on Ukraine, and helps explain many of the other signs he has displayed of his hatred for and fear of the West.

It would be challenging to write a spy thriller with more devious plot twists and turns, unexpected dangers, and covert murder and mayhem. But this is an inspiring real-life story, with a crusading human rights advocate fighting for truth and justice against a criminal tyrant, while trying to survive a relentless covert campaign to stop him at every turn. It’s gripping, informative and very relevant to the current historical and geopolitical situation. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America (2022). Mark Follman.

By now, after decades of horrifying mass shootings across the United States, in schools, malls, grocery stores, post offices, concerts, movie theaters and anywhere else that groups of people gather, most people have probably lost all hope that we will ever get this problem under control.

Particularly with the perpetual political deadlock and partisan divides on the issue of gun control, mass gun violence in our country seems to be an intractable problem from hell, with no realistic solutions available to stop the killing, and seemingly no one really trying to do anything useful.

Mark Follman’s new book, Trigger Points, provides a refreshing bit of relief from our weary and jaded view of this grim situation, along with many new insights into the nature of the problem. His topic is the field and study of threat assessment, a discipline that can be applied to many different behaviors and real-world situations, but in this case has to do with those experts in law enforcement, psychology, and education who have quietly and slowly begun to piece together a set of tools for identifying those at risk of committing attacks and finding constructive ways to head off or prevent those attacks before they happen.

In the process of telling the history of the small groups and individuals who have done the research and developed theories and practices for application in differing situations, we learn many interesting details of the research data and conclusions of the experts, which often contradict popular beliefs about mass gun violence and its perpetrators.

Some of the most important and surprising revelations in the book have to do with the popular but mistaken beliefs about the categories of people who commit these terrible violent acts. For example, it is widely believed that the perpetrators are almost all young white men, but in fact there have been many men across the entire spectrum of races and ethnic backgrounds, as well as a few women, who have carried out these kinds of mass attacks.

Another widespread but wrong belief is that all these murderous individuals are “mentally ill”. While many or most of them undoubtedly are coping with issues of depression, domestic neglect or abuse, self-loathing and suicidal ideation, only a fraction of these disturbed individuals who commit mass attacks have previous diagnoses of major mental illness. And many of them are leading lives that from the outside appear "normal", while holding down jobs, attending school or otherwise appearing to function in society.

A third misleading and useless popular belief, according to the author and the research, is that there is a useful “profile” of the mass killer that can be used to easily identify who is a likely potential mass murderer. Instead, what the threat assessment researchers have found is that there is a process, a life path followed by the individual, which has common features across many cases, and which can be recognized and interrupted with suitable interventions.

It would be easy to belittle this research, and the experts who have been developing this field of threat assessment, by pointing to the many cases of mass gun violence that continue to occur. The counter argument to that skepticism is the number of cases that have already been prevented by threat assessment experts and teams, and the lives that have already been saved, which the author spotlights from little-known case histories. As bad as it is, it could be worse.

What becomes clear from Follman’s account is the fact that these techniques and insights, developed from extensive research over the past fifty years (including extensive interviews of surviving mass killers), are not yet widely known outside the small expert community. The point is that they should be known, and the techniques and science behind it more widely shared.

Where there are existing threat assessment programs in place, combining the expertise of law enforcement, school officials, HR representatives, and others to help intervene and assist people headed down the road toward mass violence, there have been many successes. It was interesting to learn that the state of Oregon, and now Washington, are among the leading areas in the country for threat assessment programs. We need more of these programs, and many more people trained to recognize and report the common symptoms of troubled people preparing for violent acts in time for interventions to take place.

There will never be a way of anticipating every mass casualty attack, and as the author acknowledges, the number of deaths in mass gun violence events pales beside the ordinary daily toll of gun-related murder and suicide. There is no perfect solution. But in this book, we see sensible, research-based methods of heading off many of the worst gun massacres in our society, and saving the lives of victims and even sometimes the perpetrators.

It is also encouraging to hear the message that even with the huge numbers of guns in our population, the ease of acquiring them and our inability to put effective limits on access to guns due to political hyper-partisanship on this issue, there are still things we can do to improve our situation and lower the risk.

This is an important myth-busting expose’ on a confounding problem which is practically never out of our headlines anymore. It offers hope, insight, an inspiring tale of a few dedicated researchers and activists on a long mission to find effective solutions, and a plan for how we might begin to stem the tide of mass gun violence in our country. Highly recommended. 

Movie Review: Pearl Jam Twenty (2011). Written and Directed by Cameron Crowe.

Happy After-Thanksgiving day (also known by some as Black Friday). Once again, though, it’s also Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache (which is the fourth Friday of each month).

For today’s post, I’m looking backwards again to a documentary film (and DVD) from Cameron Crowe, one-time youthful rock journalist and now grown-up filmmaker, whose earliest exploits as a teenage rock fan and talented young writer were so brilliantly and amusingly portrayed (in mildly fictionalized form) in Almost Famous (2000), which is still one of my all-time favorite movies.

I’ve always had a mixed reaction to Pearl Jam. They are certainly the most successful long-lasting band to come out of the heady times here in Seattle popularly known as “the Grunge era”. They survived the rush of sudden celebrity, massive wealth, drugs and the punk rock fear of “selling out” to corporate interests which crushed other rock stars of the times, notably their friend Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. And of course, there is the civic pride in having a world-famous band of rock musicians whose origins are here in my own city. 

At the same time, I was never a big fan of punk rock, and was too “mature” in age by the early 1990s to identify with the whole new youth music scene in town, and the new bands coming out of it. I sort of missed the whole thing due to adulthood, and never dove into the various bands, the local clubs and the epoch-defining new music that was being created right downtown by local kids.

Eventually, though, I did hear some of Pearl Jam’s early songs, and they were powerful. It was also impossible not to be drawn to Eddie Vedder’s unique voice and vocal style – a rich, expressive baritone with the ability to range from high-pitched, loud screams to the softest, gentlest soothing tones. The band had the same versatility, switching from driving, passionate powerhouse rock to soulful, quieter and more introspective slower songs. Eventually I became a believer in the band and their music, if never a truly committed or devoted fan.

This was the spirit in which I approached Pearl Jam Twenty. The “twenty” in the title is for the twentieth anniversary of the band’s formation, and in that sense, the documentary was very much about a story that was not complete, since the band continues to sing and record new songs to this day. But it does very much capture the most important story about them and their storied career, which is how did this group of talented musicians find each other at this particular time, and turn their shared drive to make music into one of the most successful rock acts of our era?

Crowe does an excellent job of piecing it all together for us, using a combination of interviews with the band members and others around them, archival footage of past performances, and new performance footage. He begins with a tour through the young rock community of the 1980s in Seattle, the lifestyles of the musicians, and how the eventual members of the band met each other and first played together in other groupings.

From there, we move to the formation of Pearl Jam’s predecessor band, Mother Love Bone, and the crushing drug overdose death of their lead singer Andrew Wood. We learn how that tragedy led to the chain of fortuitous events that brought Vedder to the band from southern California.

Crowe takes us on an in-depth tour of the personalities, the clashes, the alliances and the shifting power within the band, as Vedder’s charismatic live presence and his songwriting began to push him increasingly into the spotlight and to increase his influence within the band. We learn how he and other band members weathered the stress of their sudden success, the pressures of touring, and several cataclysmic events, including a concert in Denmark where a crowd rush caused the accidental deaths of nine fans.

It’s all there – the trip from obscurity to celebrity, from poverty to wealth, the competition, the cooperation, the drugs, relationships, screw-ups and wild successes. It’s a fascinating portrait of how a band which at one time was considered “the greatest rock band in the world” survived the perils of success, and became a band of brothers who could continue to come together regularly to create great music and put on fantastic live shows over a period that now spans more than 30 years.

If you’re a fan of Pearl Jam, and haven’t seen this documentary, it’s probably essential for you to track it down and watch it, just to gather all the inside stories and details you didn’t know before. And if you’re not necessarily a fan but want to know more about them, and the Grunge era of rock in Seattle, or about what sorts of challenges musicians in top bands must face and overcome to succeed in the music business, this is a compelling film history of one of the most successful and popular rock bands of the past three decades. Recommended.

Personal Note: Another New Song and Video Released Today!

I'm very pleased to announce that I released my seventh original music single this morning, with an accompanying lyric video, on all the music streaming services and on YouTube. It's called I'm Watching You, and (despite that ambiguously ominous sounding title), it's actually a happy love story about a young family living their dreams together, with an island sound that's quite different from any of my previous songs.

This song release follows closely on the heels of my two preceding song and video releases, Science Fiction World (released November 9th) and Canadian Girl (released October 6th). If you haven't heard them yet, I'd encourage you to check them out! 

If you'd like to see the videos of any of these songs, please just click the link to my YouTube music video channel on the right column of this page.

In related news, I'm in the process of setting up an email list service for my music audience, as well as for The Memory Cache blog. I am hoping to find new ways to widen the audience for my music and my writing, while also ensuring that I don't continue to send unsolicited announcements to personal friends and family (or anyone else) who may not want to receive them. 

I'm also hoping to find a more efficient and direct way of sharing news of my activities with an intentional audience, without having to rely so heavily on social media platforms.

The new email list service (using the Mailchimp platform) will include pop-up forms on my web sites that allow readers and listeners to join my email list to receive announcements and news from me, and also to easily unsubscribe from the list at any time.  

I promise that emails from me to my list will be brief and only occasional. I don't want to fill up anyone's inbox with spam, so I will always strive to be respectful of your time and attention with any emails I send. With that said, don't be surprised if you see a pop-up invitation to join my email list on this site, and/or an email from me via the new email service, in the near future.

In the meantime, I wish you and your families a very happy Thanksgiving!

Book Review: Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman’s Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front (2017). Mary Jennings Hegar.

One of the historical anomalies of our country's recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been the increasing presence of women in our own armed forces, as well as in some of the other military forces and paramilitary groups involved in these conflicts. 

All wars are followed by the biographies and autobiographies of some of the participants; our own recent wars are no exception. But the fact that a number of these combatants are now women, with a whole new set of female perspectives, experiences, and challenges above and beyond those of their male counterparts, has led to some particularly absorbing new examples of the timeless soldier's memoir. Shoot Like A Girl is one of the best such accounts I've read to come out of the last two decades of American wars abroad.

Hegar starts at the beginning, with her Texas childhood and family. Her young years were spent with a physically abusive father, and a mother who tried but struggled to protect her and her sister from their father's rages. Eventually they escaped, and their mother remarried, providing them this time with a kind and supportive step-father, who played a positive role in convincing Mary Jennings that she could be whatever she wanted. And what she wanted more than anything since she was a small child was to be a military pilot.

From there, she takes us through her college years as an ROTC cadet, her constant striving to be the best, the accidents and setbacks she encountered in cadet training, and direction changes she had to make along the way to realize her dreams. She describes how she took flying lessons on her own to become a pilot, and the near disaster of her first long-distance solo. She tells the story of her sad short-lived first marriage, her first assignment abroad as a young Air Force officer supervising aircraft maintenance, the gender-based discrimination she encountered from the male officers above her, and a horrifying sexual assault by an Air Force physician.

Eventually, though, through sheer force of will, persistence, excellence and a little luck, she was selected for Air Force flight training. She went through the basic flight school for fixed wing aircraft, and learned to fly the Air Force's T-37 trainer, before transitioning to flying helicopters. We experience through her the incredible challenges of surviving the rigorous flight training, and what it took to make it in the macho "man's world" of military aviation.

Once she had her wings, she began flying missions in support of the civilian world: search and rescue, fire fighting, and drug interdiction. But with the onset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was inevitable she would end up there. And so she did. She volunteered, and sought it out, to serve her country, and to face the ultimate personal challenge of combat.

Her role in Afghanistan was to fly injured soldiers out of active combat areas. It was a dangerous job, with long days spent on duty, flying constantly, and frequently into "hot" landing zones. She describes it all, and how much she relished the mission, even with the pain and heartbreak of the constant injury and death around her. She also relates the range of experiences she had dealing with her fellows, including incredible solidarity and close friendships with many of her fellow servicemen and women, but also ongoing discrimination and harassment from some of the men in her units and chain of command.

She also describes the one mission where she was wounded in combat, lost her aircraft to enemy fire, and still managed to fly out on another helicopter's landing skid while firing her rifle at enemy fighters at the landing zone. That exploit earned her a Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor, as well as a Purple Heart, and made her a decorated war hero.

At the end of her story, we see how she ultimately ended her flying career with the National Guard, then became a political advocate, who helped lead the national fight to remove limitations on women serving in combat roles in the military. She also reveals that she did ultimately find happiness with another man from her Texas hometown, who became her husband and partner in her civilian life, which was a nice happy ending.

This is a very readable and inspiring adventure story of how one woman managed to live her dreams of flying and military service, even against the headwinds of institutional resistance to women serving in the Air Force, and how in the process, she became an American hero, and a force for positive change in the military. Recommended.