After stints in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a worker in a cat-food factory, blue-grass guitarist, cab driver, bartender, and counselor at a home for emotionally disturbed children, Paul Reid, and his brother, bought a small steam-valve manufacturing business in Newtonville, Mass. As Bostonians and loyal Red Sox fans, they also bought season tickets at Fenway Park, where Reid had worked as a parking lot attendant in 1967. In the early 1990s, after selling his share of the company, Reid began writing political commentary for local Massachusetts newspapers, which led to a regular op-ed column at the Boston Globe. As a free-lance writer he covered the Yugoslav civil war, narco-terrorism in Colombia, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In 1996 Reid joined The Palm Beach Post, a Cox newspaper, as a features writer. Reid was named 1998 Cox Newspapers writer of the year and won the 1998 Paul Hansell award, given by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, for reporting and writing. In 2003 he was embedded with United States Marines at the start of the Iraq War. In 2004, after his friend Bill Manchester asked him to do so, Reid left the Post to write THE LAST LION: Defender of the Realm. Paul lives in western North Carolina.