Patrick O’Donnell is the critically acclaimed author of *Beyond Valor*, which won the Colby Circle Award for Outstanding Military History, as well as *Into the Rising Sun*, *Operatives*, *Spies*, and *Saboteurs*, *We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder With the Marines Who Took Fallujah*, and most recently *The Brenner Assignment*. As a combat historian, O’Donnell was the only civilian to spend three months in Iraq in uniform and conduct oral histories of our troops in battle. He literally fought with the marines in Fallujah, was ambushed several times, and dragged a mortally wounded marine from battle. O’Donnell is also the founder of the Drop Zone (www.thedropzone.org), an award-winning web site dedicated to preserving the oral histories of veterans.

Bethanne Patrick has always been an enthusiastic and engaged reader of books, so when she started writing about authors and publishing in 1996, she brought her own interest to the stories she told and the writers she interviewed. In 2001, after years of freelance writing, Patrick joined the team of *PAGES Magazine* as editor at large. In 2004 she launched the now defunct AOL Books Channel, reaching more readers than ever before through the largest web portal in the world and where her book critic channel, "The Book Maven," was born. Under "The Book Maven," Patrick started a blog for Publishers Weekly, became the moderator for Barnes & Noble's first online book club, "Centerstage," and became managing editor of "The WETA Book Studio" a project of WETA Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C. Patrick also regularly writes for AARP, PEOPLE magazine, *The Washington Post* Book World, Barnes & Noble Review, and Bookreporter.com. She has also written a book for National Geographic entitled *An Uncommon History of Common Things*, out now. Currently, Patrick is working on a memoir entitled *Broken*.