News correspondent Leslie Cockburn has dined with the Cali Cartel, marched with the Khmer Rouge, hunted down the Black Turban in Afghanistan, pursued the Russian mafia to the Arctic Circle, shared pomegranate sauce with the Ayatollahs, and stopped a small Kurdish war, but she has never told these stories in a book-until now.

Cockburn was one of the first women to break into the tight fraternity of combat and third-world reportage when she began work at the London bureau of NBC News in 1976-where successful news gathering required "unorthodox tactics, stamina, and, for best results, a criminal mind." By the time she moved to CBS's "60 Minutes," Cockburn had interviewed Muammar Qaddaffi and Margaret Thatcher, been arrested as spy in Gambia, and effectively eliminated whatever doubts her colleagues might have had about a woman's ability to tackle the news business's most dangerous assignments.

A mother of three who has made a career of breaking down barriers, Leslie Cockburn has exposed the tobacco lobby in Washington and human rights violations in Cambodia, and her impact on foreign and domestic policy has been as powerful as her impact on the rights and prerogatives of working women. In an industry in which, as late as 1973, women had to lobby to wear trousers to work, Leslie Cockburn was determined to combine a strong family life with a strong professional life, sacrificing neither.

With a cast of generals, drug lords, rock stars, and kings, LOOKING FOR TROUBLE is the incredible story of a career that has spanned the history-making news events of the last two decades.


From the Hardcover edition.