After trying the Ivy League thing for a couple of years, I made one of best choices of my life and left Princeton for the University of California Santa Barbara. Being on the West Coast only heightened my interest in Asia. So, after graduating, I spent a couple of years working and traveling in the region, then to grad school to get a PhD in History and East Asian Languages. That’s where I met my wife, Kelly.

We ended up in RI with me teaching at the Naval War College doing work on Chinese history and contemporary Asian Security. You might have seen me on the History Channel talking about Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

We live in lovely East Greenwich RI, have a son 24 and a daughter 21. We’ve also got a little house on Block Island, so we get to spend summers in paradise!

I’ve traveled a lot for work (hitting six continents in one year once and surfing the North and South Atlantic and the South Pacific in the course of a single month). I’ve also done tours for National Geographic and The New York Times. Kelly and I are starting to travel a lot more together now that the kids are grown. One highlight was a private tour of Peru’s Sacred Valley arranged for us by a former student who commands the Peruvian Naval War College.