Tom Ashbrook is the award-winning former host of NPR's On Point. He was raised on an Illinois farm, attended Yale University and worked as a surveyor and dynamiter in Alaska's oil fields before becoming a foreign correspondent. He spent ten years in Asia, jumping between India, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. At The Boston Globe, he served as deputy managing editor until 1996, during which time he directed coverage of the end of the Cold War and the Gulf War.

He was awarded the Livingston Prize for National Reporting and named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University before taking a four-year plunge into Internet entrepreneurship, chronicled in his book The Leap. Ashbrook was enlisted to host emergency coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks and world response for NPR through WBUR, Boston, which produces On Point.

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