Jack Perkins to Read from His Own Biography at Island Books

Longtime NBC News correspondent and "Biography" host Jack Perkins will read from and sign copies of his new book "Finding Moosewood, Finding God: What Happened When a TV Newsman Abandoned His Career for Life on an Island" at Island Books 3014 78th Ave SE on Monday, April 15 from 7-8:30pm. 

Perkins was a longtime NBC News as a correspondent, commentator, and anchorman who had been on the Nightly News and The Today Show. His assignments included the 1972 Winter Olympics in Japan to elections in South Vietnam, and interviewing Bobby Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan. He also hosted 112 episodes of A&E’s "Biography" series.

In 1986 at the age of fifty-two and at the height of his career, Jack Perkins disappeared from the public eye and moved with his wife, Mary Jo, to a bare-necessities cabin on an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine. This isolated home they came to call Moosewood was the setting for Jack and Mary Jo's spiritual awakening chronicled in "Finding Moosewood, Finding God."

In the busy years of Jack's career in Los Angeles he hadn't felt the need for God. In their new, quiet, and difficult life, though, he began to rethink everything he thought he knew. For thirteen years they endured (and learned to enjoy) snowbound winters, shuttling supplies from the mainland, testing themselves and their marriage, and discovering the rewards of a close-to-nature life, acknowledging that the hand guiding their blessed new lives was the hand of a gracious God who knew them long before they acknowledged him.