This Is the Author

"I wrote this book because I wanted to read it. A couple of years ago I realized I was making all kinds of “When” decisions in my life. Everything from “when” to exercise during the day to “when” to do certain kinds of work, to “when” to abandon a project. And I realized I was making those decisions in a pretty haphazard way."

"The book’s about my career as a negotiator in responding to a wide range of hostage barricade and suicide incidents -- covering prison rides, right-wing malicious stand-offs, religious zealot sieges, terrorist embassy takeovers, airplane hijackings, and the kidnapping of American citizens abroad."

"In this New Year, you might want to try meditation. Some of you may have wondered about the benefits, stress reduction, lowering of anxiety, helping you cope more efficiently, be less frustrated, less addicted in your behavior. The most important thing from the beginning is not to turn it into another self-improvement project. Meditation can be useful if you don’t expect too much from it. So let me guide you a little bit into the way I think about it."

"Our book is about...well the short answer is our book is about meditation. The slightly longer answer is our book is for people who think meditation is not for them or that they could never do it. I had written a previous book called 10% HAPPIER which was all about how I, as a skeptical news man, stumbled upon meditation and how it made a significant difference in my life. I assumed, kind of naively, that when I wrote my book and explained all of my reasons for meditating, including the fact that there's science that suggests it's really good for you, I kind of assumed that everyone would start meditating."

"PLAYING WITH FIRE is set in the 1968 presidential campaign, but the book is about nothing less than life and death, because that's what was at stake in the 1968 presidential campaign."

"My book is called SPINELESS, and I named it that because it’s about jellyfish, and jellyfish are indeed, spineless. And it’s that very spinelessness that’s given them the ability to proliferate in today’s oceans. But it’s not just about jellyfish, it’s also about me growing my spine as a writer, a middle-aged woman, in a land-locked Austin, Texas."

"I wrote this book, AN AMERICAN FAMILY, to tell the story of my family’s immigration to the United States. But behind all this, the American values that inspired me to decide to come to the United States and then make it a home."

"I had been working in the single-mom space through my blog and podcast, and speaking and media engagements, for more than five years. I was raised by a single mom, I became a single mom, and I had a lot of initial shame around being a single mom. And, you know what? It happens to suit me really well. And I found myself relaxing into this time that I’m in and finding all these women—there’s ten million single moms in our country, millions worldwide, and these women have nothing to be ashamed about. I’m meeting incredible women every day that are doing incredible things—in business, in their communities, with their families—and I wanted to reach out to them. And I wanted to inspire the women that aren’t quite there yet."

"My book is about how I learned to be a leader and how I built my company. I wrote it because when I started I would spend every Friday night in the bookstore, reading about CEOs and successful organizations, so that I could learn from them. And I found wonderful stories and amazing stories of success, but I always left wondering how they did it."

"My book is about life in the Texas border country. It follows my family’s migration into Texas from Missouri in the 1850s. But in a larger sense, it’s about the migration of different peoples, through a distinctly unwelcoming landscape over the last 14,000 years."