An inside view of a woman in TV news

ALL THINGS AT ONCE. By Mika Brzezinski with Daniel Paisner. Weinstein Books. 232 pages. $25.95.

Mika Brzezinski, now a successful, seasoned reporter, describes getting fired in 2006 by the president of CBS News, who simply tells her: "Sorry, it's just subjective."

At this point, you realize this isn't just another famous-mother-balancing-work-and-children memoir.

For certain, Brzezinski, 42, co-host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," had the advantage of being the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. And it's true that few 9-year-old girls are asked to play with Amy Carter at the White House.

But as a young, inexperienced reporter, Brzezinski also found much was expected of her. Like when Charleston resident Tom Bradford, then executive producer of CBS' "Up to the Minute" program, assigned her foreign policy interviews for which she was embarrassingly ill-prepared. Later, still at CBS, she became one of the first two reporters on the air to describe, on-site, the World Trade Center disaster, after leaping from a cab in a traffic jam and running dozens of blocks, sans shoes.

After five years of turning out stories for various CBS programs, she was fired.

Brzezinski is brutally frank about how a woman's appearance matters as much as her on-air prowess in television. But the most salient point she makes is to warn women not to let their job become "like a bad boyfriend, whom you give yourself over to completely, but then learn he's just keeping you around until something better comes along."