At the age of thirty-five, with virtually no major professional contacts, Kathleen Barnes left her marriage and her job as a small-town reporter to become a free-lance foreign correspondent. Within a year and a half she found herself reporting for ABC from inside one of the world's most explosive political hot-beds: the Philippines.

What the author discovers-about the true nature of the "People's Power" movement and Corazon Aquino; about violence, corruption, and the potential for peaceful social change; and about herself and her own capacity to withstand untold terrors-becomes in the telling a political expose, a heart-stopping adventure, and a compelling story of a woman's coming of age. Barne's memoir traces the ironic evolution of someone who, after seven years amid poverty, corruption and violence, finds that she cannot return to the complacency of living in freedom and comfort.