Product Description

In one of the most anticipated books of the year, Lee Woodruff, along with her husband, Bob Woodruff, share their never-before-told story of romance, resilience, and survival following the tragedy that transformed their lives and gripped a nation.

In January 2006, the Woodruffs seemed to have it all–a happy marriage and four beautiful children. Lee was a public relations executive and Bob had just been named co-anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight. Then, while Bob was embedded with the military in Iraq, an improvised explosive device went off near the tank he was riding in. He and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, were hit, and Bob suffered a traumatic brain injury that nearly killed him.

In an Instant is the frank and compelling account of how Bob and Lee’s lives came together, were blown apart, and then were miraculously put together again–and how they persevered, with grit but also with humor, through intense trauma and fear. Here are Lee’s heartfelt memories of their courtship, their travels as Bob left a law practice behind and pursued his news career and Lee her freelance business, the glorious births of her children and the challenges of motherhood.

Bob in turn recalls the moment he caught the journalism “bug” while covering Tiananmen Square for CBS News, his love of overseas assignments and his guilt about long separations from his family, and his pride at attaining the brass ring of television news–being chosen to fill the seat of the late Peter Jennings.

And, for the first time, the Woodruffs reveal the agonizing details of Bob’s terrible injuries and his remarkable recovery. We learn that Bob’s return home was not an end to the journey but the first step into a future they have learned not to fear but to be grateful for.

In an Instant is much more than the dual memoir of love and courage. It is an important, wise, and inspiring guide to coping with tragedy–and an extraordinary drama of marriage, family, war, and nation.

A percentage of the proceeds from this book will be donated to the Bob Woodruff Family Fund for Traumatic Brain Injury.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #280318 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Released on: 2007-02-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400066674
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. There's a reason Lee Woodruff's name comes first in this collaboration. While this celebrity memoir revolves around the war injuries suffered by ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff, it's really his wife's story. Drawn from the journals she kept during his recovery and also delving deeply into the history of the couple's courtship and family life, this gritty memoir is well served by Lee's capable and compelling speaking voice. Woodruff's vocal control is strong, even mesmerizing, and she peppers the grave reminiscences with funny stories and witty observations. Her voice sometimes breaks with emotion, whether describing her fears after learning of her husband's condition or earlier heartaches when coping with a miscarriage or learning of the profound hearing loss of one of their twin daughters. Bob intervenes occasionally to describe his family, various career ups and downs, and what he remembers about the incident that rendered him a casualty of war. Listeners may wish to have a tissue or two on hand while they listen to this beautiful story of marriage for better and for worse. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Lee Woodruff and Bob Woodruff live in Westchester County, New York, with their four children. Bob Woodruff was named co-anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight in December 2005. On January 29, 2006, while reporting on U.S. and Iraqi security forces, Mr. Woodruff was seriously injured by a roadside bomb that struck his vehicle near Taji, Iraq. Lee Woodruff is a public relations executive and freelance writer.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

Lee

Orlando, Florida, January 28, 2006

There is a ride at Disney World called the Tower of Terror, and on the weekend of January 28, 2006, my four children, even the twin five- year-olds, begged me to go on that ride over and over again.

Housed in a re-created aging Hollywood hotel, the ride begins where you climb into a creaky elevator that snakes its way through the creepy premises. An electrical storm kicks up, and right on cue something goes wrong with the power. The elevator in the eerie hotel suddenly drops. The descent is so rapid, so sudden, that it almost sucks your diaphragm up into your throat, and right before the drop there is a moment where you are literally suspended in air, too stunned to scream. It feels as if speed, motion, light, and time literally freeze.

We must have taken that ride a half dozen times. And then the feeling returned the following morning as I rolled over in my king-sized hotel bed. The day before, the kids and I had been to the Animal Kingdom in Disney World. We’d marveled at the African safari ride, ridden rapids in Asia, and gotten soaked as we howled our way down the man-made white water. After an early dinner we’d rented a pedal bike with another family and laughed until we cried as we raced other bikers around the lake, while fireworks from Epcot exploded overhead.

Tucking four kids into bed that night, I silently congratulated myself on a good weekend. I’d come to Disney to shoot a pilot TV show for Family Fun. We’d spent two days on set and then the rest of the time had been the kids’ reward: combing the parks for Disney character autographs for the twins and thrill-seeking rides for the older two. We’d planned to fly back home on Sunday and get ready for school.

Toting around four children by myself was not new. That weekend my husband, Bob Woodruff, the newly anointed co-anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, was thousands of miles away in Iraq. We spoke to him briefly that day, in between the safari and the rapids ride. He and his crew had had a tiring day covering the Palestinian elections before flying on to Baghdad in advance of President Bush’s State of the Union address. The plan was to bolster ABC’s Iraq coverage at an important moment in the war. The pace was blistering, common to any foreign correspondent who must keep moving and file stories from faraway places in time zones eight to twelve hours ahead of our own.

Bob and his crew were operating on an aggressive schedule with only a few hours’ sleep each night. As usual, the itinerary was punishing. Get in, get the stories about the Iraqi military, anchor from Baghdad during Bush’s address, do some pieces for Good Morning America, and, on the way back, try to finalize an interview with the King of Jordan in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

Our conversations with him from Disney World had been short and tough. The cell service in Iraq was spotty and the time difference was frustrating. We had one conversation midday Saturday, as he and his crew were going to bed in a military compound somewhere in Baghdad. He exhaustedly mumbled something about getting much-needed sleep the next day. Exactly what he said didn’t register with me at the time. My daughter Cathryn was determined to buy a puka shell necklace. With my shoulder cradling the cell phone, I negotiated some cash from my wallet while keeping an eye on the twins, who were dangerously close to a fence in front of a bamboo grove.

Later, Bob would swear that he told me has was going to embed with the military for some exercises, while I would swear he said only that his team was going to relax for the day. At the end of our conversation I passed the cell phone around so the kids could say hi. This was common practice in our house—good nights, kisses, homework help, all via satellite. When your father covers news around the world, the phone becomes a primary communication tool, for better or worse.

“Do you feel safe there?” I asked absentmindedly, collecting the change from Cathryn. “Are you okay?” It was a stupid rhetorical question, made more absurd by the fact that we were currently standing in Disney World, “the happiest place on earth,” while he was somewhere in the most violent place on the planet.

“I do. We’re surrounded by the military. It’s fine,” he reassured me. He and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, couldn’t know that the elevator was about to drop. In the ocher-colored sands on a godforsaken highway outside Baghdad, they were about to enter their own Tower of Terror.

That night I called the front desk to request a 7 a.m. wake-up call. With the bigger kids sleeping next to the twins, perhaps I could slip downstairs the next morning and take a quick swim in the pool before breakfast. Even though it was January in Florida, the water was invigorating and it would be a great way to start our last day in Orlando.

In a few days Bob would be home and we’d be a family again. His new appointment as co-anchor had set a grueling pace for the past month, even the weekends. His days had been crammed with photo shoots, press conferences, and ad campaigns. The new program with Bob and Elizabeth Vargas was committed to go to the story, to have one anchor on the road and one in the studio as often as possible. Bob relished the challenge. It was a new era at ABC News. There was an excitement at the broadcast that was a welcome tonic after the months of sorrow following Peter Jennings’s illness and then death from lung cancer. Bob and Elizabeth would give the news department something to rally around, after feeling like a ship without its beloved captain.

“Just get through January,” I had told Bob, as he left for the Middle East on that fateful trip. It had become a kind of mantra for us after the announcement, as he shot out of the gate as a newly minted co-anchor.

“I really don’t want to leave you guys,” he said, as he leaned into the door frame of my home office, rolling suitcase in hand. He looked exhausted, distracted, and not eager to get back on a plane to return to Iraq for the sixth or seventh time in three years. The town car was already idling in the driveway.

“Just get through January,” I repeated, “and life will take on a more normal pattern. We’ll have weekends again, and we can be a family.”

He reeled off everything he’d packed, hoping I’d figure out what he might have missed. This was familiar territory, this nonchalant leaving. It should have had more weight, but to give it any more importance would have jinxed it in my mind. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Gaza Strip: give him a kiss as always, treat it like a normal morning, and he will come home safe and sound. I had a work deadline that day, and the sooner I got him on the road the faster I could finish my task.

Frankly, I didn’t think a lot about Bob over the Disney weekend either. The days had been full and the kids eager to pack in as much as possible. Bob drew sustenance from being on the road; the stories, the energy, the adrenaline rejuvenated him. He loved being a journalist, and that meant leaving us for stretches of time. We may not have always liked it, but we had made peace with it as a family. Periods of being intensely together were interlaced with periods of being apart.

As I rolled over and turned off the bedside light that Saturday night in Disney World, I thought we would all rise to this new challenge of Bob’s career as well. “Co-anchor.” It was good and bad. Good because he had reached the pinnacle of his profession, a plum job in television news, a successor to one of broadcast journalism’s icons. Bad because we would see him even less. Our definition of family time would need some revising.

The Sunday morning phone call pierced the quiet and I jolted awake to a bedspread of floral and chintz in a totally unfamiliar room. It took me a second to register where I was. Ah, right, I thought. Disney World. The wake-up call.

I rolled over and picked up the receiver. “Thank you,” I said, and lazily began to set it back on the cradle. I had decided to lie there for a few more minutes before I snuck out the door.

“Lee?” A faint voice came from the receiver, now almost back in place. Geesh, I thought. Personalized wake-up calls, how very Disney. I brought the phone back to my ear to thank the man.

“Lee, it’s David Westin,” the voice said.

He had my immediate attention. My brain fired signals to my body as I bolted up on the pillows. The president of ABC News does not make social calls to employees’ wives at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning, even a co-anchor’s wife. I licked my lips and swallowed. My mouth was dry.

“We’ve been trying to reach you,” he said, in a slow measured voice. He stopped for a beat as if to gauge how he would say his next line. “Bob has been wounded in Iraq.”

I sat straight up, trying to process the information I was hearing. Every synapse in my brain was firing. “Wounded?” I said to David Westin, as calmly as I could. “What do you mean wounded?”

“He was on an embed outside of Baghdad riding with the Iraqi army. We don’t have a lot of information right now, Lee, but we are getting it as fast as we can. We are getting him the best care possible.”

“David.” I interrupted him. “Is my husband alive?”

“Yes, Lee. Bob is alive, but we believe he may have taken shrapnel to the brain.”

I tried to digest what that meant and couldn’t comprehend it. He was alive; I’d start with that. The rest was gravy.

“What was an anchor doing on a military exercise?” I asked, voice rising. “The last thing I knew he was doing a story about an ice cream shop in Baghdad....

Customer Reviews

Absolutely fabulous book on terrifying topic, but filled with love and hope
In An Instant is a poignant and powerful book of love, of war, of hope, of recovery and of life. It is truly hard to find an accolade this book does not deserve. It is about Bob Woodruff and and his awful injury while covering the Iraqi war, a month after being promoted to co-anchor replacing Peter Jennings. A man at the apex of his career, who loves doing what he does, a noted world traveler and correspondent and, In An Instant, his and his family's life is quite literally blown to pieces. But it is also book very much about Lee and Bob's marriage, from their first date, and one that would have been worth reading even without the trauma suffered covering the war. Lee writes wonderfully about the career risks Bob made, and she lovingly supported, as he went from a lucrative law career to pursue his passion that he developed for journalism and the rush of covering news events, large and small. Tiananmen Square to a train wreck in Northern California.

This wonderfully written book was done with his wife, Lee, clearly a very capable writer herself and mother of their four children. The construction on the book is cleverly done with its movement back and forth in time, but never confusing to the reader and always done to develop a point or complete a story. Written collaberatively, it is part Lee, descriptive and emotional, holding a family together and, part Bob, ever the facts based journalist. What began as a journal being kept by Lee for Bob, knowing he would want to know what happened while he was in a coma, became this book, appropriately subtitled, "A Family's Journey of Love and Healing".

The recovery of Mr. Woodruff is clearly nothing short of miraculous in an age where we don't believe in miracles. But the strength of his entire family, centered around his wife Lee and his four children, and his own desire to live for these many wonderful reasons is very clear. This book is nothing sappy but clearly heartwarming and, at times, very scary as no one can read it and not wonder how quickly their own lives can change, even without putting oneself in the dangerous situations our journalists do every day in these war ravaged countries.

Readers will start thinking they know and like Bob Woodruff. They will come away loving his family, especially his wife, and very capable writer, Lee.

'Will He Still Love Me?"
Lee Woodruff questions her husband's physician " Will he still love me?" Yes, his phyiscian answers. I have not had a patient who didn't love the people he loved before."

'In An Instant' is more than a poignant review of the year in the life of Lee and Bob Woodruff. This book is a reflection of their thoughts, prayers, experiences and day to day life. Bob Woodruff, ABC journalist, was in Iraq to report on the war and was critically injured. Half of his brain, the left half was inujred and that portion of his skull was removed to decrease the swelling. He was operated on at once and flown to Germany to be stabilized and then to Bethesda, Maryland with his critical brain injury. It took 5 weeks of constant care and love by his family and medical team before he awoke. Lee tells us about her struggles and the family issues and the constant anxiety of watching her husband fight for his life. At one point at the end of the five weeks, Lee got into bed with Bob amidst his tubes and lines and told him he needed to fight, they needed him. Two days later she walked into the Intensive Care Unit,and he was sitting up in bed, and said, "Sweetie, Where ya been?" From that time the fight began in earnest for Bob who had suffered a traumatic brain injury to renew his life.

Lee Woodruff, the real hero of the story, gives us an honest, compelling look at what life was like for her. Trying to find time for four children, her husband who was crtically ill, and then recovering and balancing what she needed to do to keep her body and soul together. She talks often of the other families she met, the Iraq and Afghanistan war wounded. When Bob finally did wake up and his rehab and recovery began in earnest,life became busier and she had to become more resilient.

Bob Woodruff during his rehabilitation became involved in the lives of other men and women who had suffered as he did. He will continue to follow the TBI (traumatic brain injured) soldiers and attempt to assist in whatever manner he can. After his recovery he needed to go through more surgery to replace the piece of skull on the left side of his head. Today he looks as he did before his injury. He has had a remarkable recovery. He still has times when he cannot remember some words. He and Lee visited the Intensive Care Unit at Bethesda to thank his caregiving team. Everyone was overwhelmed. Bob was only the fifth person out of hundreds who had recovered enough to come back and visit.

Lee tells an amazing story about Bruce Springsteen and Bob. Bob loves Bruce Springsteen and has his music playing full blast at all times. The day Lee climbed into bed with Bob she told him that if he got better Bruce Springsteen would come and play for him. A few days after Bob woke up he stood up and said "I gotta get one of those string things, a guitar. So I can play with Bruce when he comes.". Oh, oh, Lee thought, Bruce is not coming, but how did Bob hear this?" It is said that people in comas can register voices, and we have an example right here with Bob. Come On Bruce Springsteen, go and play for Bob and the wounded Vets.

Life goes on, we all know that. Disaster, critical injuries, surgery, critical care for 5 weeks or more and then awakening. Followed by recovery and the long journey home. 'In An Instant' life changes and will never again be the same. Lee and Bob Woodruff have shown us the courage and strength it takes to perservere.
Highly recommended. prisrob 3-01-07

This Book Makes You Feel Good About Being a Human Being
It is spiritually uplifting to see beautiful people behave in a beautiful way. Bob Woodruff's wife, Lee, in trying to assess what is now possible after her husband's terrible brain injury asks the doctor, "But will he still love me?" It is a moment of substance in a world where image too often passes for it. This is more than a book of recovery. Bob Woodruff's setback in life seems to be more than that. It seems to have widened his horizons and connected him to his fellow man in ways that he says he could not previously have imagined.

Many people think that happiness is somehow caused by circumstances other than their own thinking. This is not true. Lottery winners, plucked from otherwise disastrous fates by Lady Luck, seldom maintain their new sense of well-being. And normal people, overwhelmed with sudden and unexpected tragedy, can regain their inner happiness despite grievous losses.

I am a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist specializing in depression. I have seen many different reactions to tragedy among those coming to my office seeking help. When you see someone calmly accept what fate has just handed them, when you watch them immediately seek to make something worthwhile out of their new day instead of vainly looking back and wishing for their former life, when you notice how they steadfastly refuse to entertain a negative option, you can't help but be elevated right along with them. They inspire you to hope that when your own turn to suffer comes along, perhaps you too can prevail as these heroes who have gone ahead to show the way. This is not a book about recovery, this is a book about trancendence. A. B. Curtiss, author of BRAINSWITCH OUT OF DEPRESSION