Ronald Brickman grew up in the remote mountain town of West Point in central California. At the age of seven, he started taking lessons from a local piano teacher, an event that changed his life. He graduated with the highest honors from Stanford University and earned a doctorate in political science from MIT. Like his piano teacher before him, he spent many of his adult years abroad, particularly working in an international affairs institute in Paris under one of his former teacher's colleagues and as a member of the faculty of the University of Strasbourg, France. He also had appointments at Cornell, Vanderbilt, and Stanford. He is the senior author of Controlling Chemicals: The Politics of Regulation in Europe and the US (Cornell University Press, 1985) and numerous academic articles. In his mid-40s, he returned to his hometown to reside on the property inherited from his teacher and became a piano teacher himself, as well as a concert pianist, concert manager, and grower of heirloom apples on the historic Hollingshead property. This is his first non-academic book.