Looking for Trouble - Hardcover

Peters, Ralph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811734102 ISBN 13: 9780811734103

Publisher: Stackpole Books, 2008

Synopsis

Ralph Peters--career soldier, controversial strategist, prize-winning, best-selling novelist, erstwhile rock musician, popular columnist, and old-fashioned adventurer--has always been good for a surprise. Now, for the first time, Peters recounts the personal experiences that shaped his views of the world, from the collapsing Soviet Union to the drug wars of the Andean Ridge, from quiet forays into Burma and Laos to military missions to Pakistan and the Caucasus--and on to the Southwest border of the United States and the meanest streets of Los Angeles. As the U.S. Army's chosen troubleshooter before he took off his uniform to write, Peters saw the greatest international dramas of our times and the personal tragedies they created from a truly unique perspective--and took advantage of every moment "outside of the wire."
The result is startling: the liveliest adventure memoir by an American in decades, a perfect balance of high drama and laugh-out-loud hilarity. Readers--among them his many devoted fans--will meet a faded beauty and former favorite singer of Josef Stalin's, now in her nineties and still a hopeless coquette; KGB officers who refuse to let go of the past in Moscow's back streets; a winsome princess adrift in a dying world; the corrupt Thai police general whose hobby was imitating Elvis to karaoke machines in rural bordellos; sentimental Caucasian gangsters; oblivious diplomats; wary Burmese colonels; doomed Mexican drug cops; Mennonite marijuana farmers; lonesome Nazi widows in Bolivia--and their Jewish friends; Muslim fundamentalists who write love poetry to imagined sweethearts . . . and, above all, the author's two loyal brothers-in-arms who sometimes shared the dangers and the wonder at the "back of beyond" and whose remarkable personal backgrounds, dashingly eccentric personalities, and appetite for adventure explode every cliché about military officers.
Beautifully written and hauntingly told, Looking for Trouble is simply the book Ralph Peters was born to write. We can all be glad that he came back alive to write it.

About this title

About the Author

Fox News Strategic Analyst Ralph Peters is the author of 27 books, including bestselling and prize-winning novels. He has experience in over 70 countries and, as a journalist, has covered multiple conflicts. His work has appeared in a wide range of publications and he serves on the advisory board of Armchair General magazine. He lives in Virginia.

From the Back Cover

FROM POIGNANT encounters in the ruins of Russia to surreal road trips in the Middle East, from face-offs with swastika-flaunting thugs in Armenia to a long Asian night in the company of the world's most dangerous Elvis impersonator, Ralph Peters' recounting of his remarkable--and sometimes downright bizarre--travels as an unorthodox intelligence officer glide between the haunting and the hilarious.

Sent off to sift the wreckage of other people's conflicts or assigned to investigate strategic crises first-hand, Peters traveled-- alone or in the company of a few remarkable fellow soldiers--to the badlands of Pakistan and darkness-at-noon Burma, into Iraq on foot and down the drug-ravaged streets of Los Angeles. Whether dodging cocaine cowboys in the Andean Ridge or walking alone into fundamentalist-run refugee camps, Peters brings his adventures and misadventures to romping life in a beautifully written book that's also laugh-out-loud funny.

Looking for Trouble's dramatic settings range from a Kremlin basement to safe houses in Mexico, and its driving issues move from the collapse of empires to the fate of our POW/MIAs, but its true subjects are the unforgettable characters that leap to life in these pages: a dangerous narco-general determined to keep the disco era alive; an insanely brave Special Forces officer who sneaks into Taliban-run Afghanistan to play polo; a wistful princess trapped in a lost world; a dashing Hungarian-American Army captain who has a genius for getting into--then back out of--trouble; a happy-go-lucky gangster whose luck runs out just before dawn; doomed Mexican cops and KGB hard-liners; gunmen and militias of various descriptions; an Army major who could be mistaken for a knight arrived by time machine from seventeenth-century Poland; and with guest appearances by the Buddha and Boris Yeltsin.

Sometimes by design, at other times by dumb luck, Ralph Peters was on the spot to see the global storm clouds gathering: the rise of Islamist extremism, the spread of murderous warrior culture, the breakdown of fragile states, and above all, the human stories crushed beneath the headlines.

Fans of Ralph Peters' writing on strategy and military affairs will recognize the sources of his ahead-of-its-time thinking in these pages--but this luminous book is, at heart, a love letter to lost worlds and splendid friends. Above all, it's enormous fun to read.

RALPH PETERS has been a lifelong traveler, in and out of uniform, with experience in 70 countries on six continents--and has a talent for spotting (and enjoying) crises. After rising from the rank of Army private, he retired shortly after his promotion to lieutenant colonel to write with greater freedom. His twenty-three published books, written under his own name and as Owen Parry, include influential works on strategy and security affairs, prize- winning historical novels, and bestselling thrillers. An opinion columnist for the New York Post, Peters has written for a wide range of publications and is a frequent media commentator. Recent travels have taken him back to Israel, throughout Africa, and back to Iraq.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811734102
• ISBN 13: 9780811734103
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368