The most successful authors I know enjoy the process of learning and got into the business from the pleasure and challenge of writing.

Impatience, mistrustfulness, and competitiveness with other writers can be very damaging to a career. Focus on your own content, find your own best voice, and enjoy the ride. This can be a wonderful business.
--John Talbot

By: Rosemary Dew and Pat Pape

In her thirteen years as special agent for the FBI, Rosemary Dew worked undercover against criminals, spies, and terrorists, earning eight commendations for her service. Despite her achievements, for her entire tenure she remained the subject of severe discrimination and even sexual harassment that the bureau seemed to condone rather than condemn. In elegant and deeply felt prose, Dew argues that this climate of corruption and duplicity not only taints the experience of the FBI's few female agents but also leads directly to some of the bureau's most harmful failures, such as the remarkable intelligence breakdown that allowed spy Robert Hanssen to operate undetected for more than two decades. Narrated by one of the most successful- and one of the only-women in the bureau's history, No Backup is a startling look at the destructive and discriminatory culture that dominates one of America's most powerful agencies, as well as an impassioned plea to an organization that must reform itself.

Jobs may vary, but office culture is depressingly consistent. In No Backup, Rosemary Dew details life at a "stodgy institution" where managers are unfair, punishments are capricious and blind loyalty to the boss is valued above all else. That pretty much sums up my last experience in the corporate world. The difference is that Dew's employer was the FBI, so this particular tale of workplace dysfunction is all too relevant to every American.

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