If you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you likely still don’t know much about me. I like to keep a bit of mystery. And, frankly, I’m not that interesting.
So, you probably don’t know that I have been writing a book.
As much as I enjoy this newsletter, for the last four years my posts have emerged from hasty scribbles made in the dusty corners of days and nights spent thinking about something else entirely.
That something is a man named David Rhoiney. Over the past few years, I have spent dozens of hours in David’s company, and thousands of hours in his life. This is the result.
Unlike me, David is interesting. In fact, he has had the most interesting life of anyone I’ve ever met.
David is a surgeon, a former naval officer and cryptologist, a two-sport NCAA Division I athlete, and a Black man. Statistically speaking, he had no business achieving what he did before turning 40. But David, despite a degree in applied mathematics, has never been one to bow to statistics. If he had, he’d never have made it out of childhood.
His story starts in Compton, in the early 1990s. When his father drives off one morning, David is left to become the man his manic-depressive mother needs. He is five years old.
Twelve years of hell follow. Drive-by shootings. Strangers in overalls dragging his mother away. Long nights in a Volkswagen Jetta, then a homeless shelter.
Basketball saves him. He becomes obsessed with that orange ball, using it to earn a place at the Naval Academy, where he starts to dream of medicine while navigating the merciless competition of Division I sports. But first, a career as a naval officer awaits, one that takes him straight to the corridors of national intelligence…
I don’t want to say too much more about his story, as that would give the game away. But it is, to use the official terminology, absolutely bananas.
And I think No One’s Coming to Save You is pretty bananas too. An unconventional life deserves to be told unconventionally. My guiding principle was to tell David’s life from the inside, and in the moment. To help the reader see what David saw, hear what he heard, feel what he felt. I think the result is pretty unique. I’ve already heard some nice things about it:
This is a film newsletter. And, like a news presenter who can’t entirely smother his regional accent, I could not stop cinema from slipping onto the page. There are movie references aplenty, together with a few Easter eggs for the eagle-eyed.
Which is all to say that, even if you don’t usually go for this sort of book, I think there’s something for you here.
So now we get to the business end of the post. The book comes out on 8 December in hardback, Kindle and audiobook. Pre-orders are open on my publisher’s website and Amazon.
The more pre-orders the book gets, the better chance it has of getting momentum in the wild west of release week. So, if you think you may one day want to read this, or if you know someone who would, then pre-ordering now would help give the book the best possible start.
Pre-order No One’s Coming to Save You today.
They aren't ready for this one