Lee and Bob Woodruff's "In An Instant"

Lee Woodruff and Bob Woodruff live in Westchester County, New York. 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, he was seriously injured by a roadside bomb that struck his vehicle near Taji, Iraq.

Lee Woodruff, a public relations executive and freelance writer, applied the "Page 99 Test" to their book, In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing, and reported the following:

On Page 99 of In an Instant, my husband, Bob Woodruff, then a teacher of American Law in Beijing, China, meets Susan Zirinksy, a top producer for CBS News. Bob and I had been married just a few months before in New York and had left for China the day after the wedding to begin life in Peace Corps-like conditions at a poor university on the other side of the world.

At the time, Bob had no classes, as all of his students were protesting in Tiananmen Square. He asked Susan for a job as a Chinese translator for the American news crews covering the student protests and she gave him a shot.

Susan, or “Z” as she is known, would prove to be a fulcrum person in our lives because it is she who gave my husband the opportunity to witness journalism first-hand as the amazing and soon-to-be tragic events of Tiananmen Square unfolded and were played and re-played on television screens around the world. Bob’s experience of being on Tiananmen Square when the protesters were attacked and the tanks rolled in, and what he witnessed in the aftermath of the attack galvanized his desire to change careers and pursue a life in journalism.

On this particular page, you can see the way a moment, a chance encounter and the taking of a risk changed the direction of not only Bob’s career, but our life as it unfolded down to the very moment Bob’s APC was attacked in Iraq by an explosion that shattered his skull, would rip into all of our lives and take us on a year long journey to heal.

Bob is a risk-taker and a driven, motivated, brilliant person. Meeting "Z" at CBS in Beijing was the turning point that set him on a course of hard work, fame, tragedy and, ultimately, true loss and recovery.

Read an excerpt from In An Instant, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue