UP AND COMING FOR SUBMISSION
For 20 years, car industry leaders and analysts have perpetrated the myth that the business is a victim of circumstance and market forces beyond its control and that the individuals responsible for making decisions always acted in good faith but were blind-sided. Maryann Keller, one of the leading analysts in the automotive business, shatters this myth in ROAD'S END: THE COLLAPSE OF THE BIG THREE AUTO MAKERS AND HOW IT COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED, a hard-hitting view of who is really to blame for wrecking an industry that was once a bedrock of the American economy. Keller tells the story as a morality play, probing inside the culture and naming names. No one escapes responsibility: executives, boards, labor leaders, Wall Street analysts, and elected officials are all brought to account for their sins of commission and omission on the road to ruin. If the definition of virtue is a practical realism and a mission to do what's best for the good of the industry, these players are most certainly sinners--even deadly sinners. Keller makes full use of her experience and contacts to provide a vivid portrait of the individuals whose greed, ignorance, and short-term thinking has obliterated the command of The Big Three. She then offers a practical roadmap for recovery--one that will require serious penance in the executive suites, boardrooms, Wall Street offices, union floors, and halls of Congress. An explosive exposé, ROAD'S END promises to be a must-read investigation of the near-death of an entire industry.
Ed Engoron has the best job in the world. For more than 25 years, he has eaten his way through 130 countries, devouring chocolate and meeting and being fed by everyone from the locals on an isolated cacao plantation to world famous chefs, bakers, and chocolatiers. He has sipped bittersweet rough-milled chocolate under a jungle canopy in Brazil; bitten into fresh, creamy truffles that brought tears to his eyes one snowy Christmas Eve in Bruges; eaten chocolate molé in sleepy Oaxacan towns and bustling Mexico City restaurants; and savored each and every one of the wonderful confections produced by Messr. Robert Linxe, long worshipped as the premier Paris chocolatier at La Maison du Chocolat. Engoron circled the globe in his pursuit to understand chocolate and bring its secrets home for an ever more discerning and demanding American consumer base. CHOCOLATES OUT OF THE BOX is a slice of his life as a food adventurer and dessert anthropologist. It is a culinary quest, an evocation of chocolate's appeal, and a primer to enable readers to share in a chocolate indulgence lifestyle. Creator of the enormously successful online gourmet chocolate portal, Choclatique, Engoron is an enthusiast and expert in the world's most delicious and luxurious food. His book promises to be the perfect treat for a world of chocoholics.
Who says depression is without its joys? As the introduction to THE JOYS OF DEPRESSION will note, "People who suffer severe prolonged depressions derive great satisfaction and comfort from them." In other words, don't go to a party. It might take your mind off things. Don't go to a good movie. That could ruin a bad mood. And really don't take pills. They wear off, and they're constipating. Conceived as a serious, thought-provoking novelty book, THE JOYS OF DEPRESSION aims to mirror the negative, self-destructive thoughts in the mind of a person in a persistently sad or melancholy mood, which reflection then smiles back with gentle, self-mocking humor. Joan Konner is a long-time, award-winning (16 Emmys) television producer; a writer for popular magazines, scholarly journals, and television scripts; and the former Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her new book, following up the national bestseller The Atheist's Bible, is a witty and wise look at all the ways to feel good about feeling bad.
Life gets better as we get older, on every level except the physical. Not knowing this, young people dread getting older. They think little of worth or fun happens in the last decades of life, at the same time that their own considerable travails seem to accumulate. Actually, the late teens and the twenties are the hardest years of our lives. This is when we thrash around with questions of identity and meaning, while trying to figure out the complexities of many kinds of relationships. It turns out that our society's ardent veneration of youth and denigration of later life is a colossal mistake. With LIFE GETS BETTER, author Wendy Lustbader's celebratory follow-up to her very successful What's Worth Knowing, we are shown how the most important aspects of life improve as we become more experienced with life's difficulties and grow more receptive to all available pleasures.
As the Roman empire grew at the start of the first millennium, Latin was spoken in many forms, but it was the commoner's version called "Vulgar Latin" that evolved into the Romance Languages of Southern Europe. VULGAR TRAVELS IN ROMANTIC LANDS will chronicle the trials and tribulations of David Wood in the domains of those ancient tongues-Portugal, Spain, France, Romania, and Italy-in search of the secrets of love. As a 52-year-old never-married man, Wood will seek out the advice of those in love. He'll hunt for and explore romantic settings as well as the long-standing tales of love from literature and lore of the respective countries. Using a great deal of humor (especially regarding his own ineptitude), he will try to see if a semi-old dog can be taught new romantic tricks. Hey, it's worth a shot. Writer, speaker, and humorist Wood is a former stand-up comedian whose excellent writing and gleeful lack of ego will aid him in this clear-eyed valentine to the lands of love.
Amateurs and pros line up next to each other at the starting line for every triathlon, and the pros can win thousands of dollars on race day. The amateurs--the ones who hold down full-time jobs, coach themselves and don't have sponsors--battle for a shiny medal and bragging rights. Increasingly, these athletes are coming from higher age brackets. This spring, 44-year-old pro triathlete Fernanda Keller became the oldest person to win an Ironman race, beating every single woman (and most of the men) at Ironman Brazil. A glance at 2008 Ironman races across the US shows men aged 40-50 making regular podium finishes. And every small town with a triathlon community has someone like Cherie Fernandez, who is the most feared female triathlete in Richmond, Virginia. The 43-year-old mother of two nearly always beats the hundreds of other women in the race. In her latest book, EAGLEMAN, Phaedra Hise will follow half a dozen male and female Masters athletes as they spend a year training and hoping to finish Eagleman, one of triathlon's toughest races. It begins with a 1.2 mile swim in Maryland's Choptank River, followed by a 58-mile bike ride and a 13-mile run. If you're fast, the race takes about six hours. EAGLEMAN will explore the growing numbers of older athletes and why they compete so obsessively. The book will combine personal narratives, research data, the particular issues that Masters triathletes face, and the sometimes ridiculous situations that Lycra-clad geezers with shaved legs find themselves in. A celebrated writer known for her special brand of immersion journalism, Hise also completed her first triathlon at the age of 40. Bringing a runner's spirit and a writer's gifts to the table, her EAGLEMAN is sure to be a thrilling look at a group of dedicated, hard-working, and exciting athletes.
An evolved form of intelligence, unlike IQ, may be the wellspring of humanity's advances--and ultimately the salvation of life as we know it. In their revealing new work, BEYOND IQ: THE CASE FOR AN ADVANCED INTELLIGENCE, Kenneth Heilman, M.D., and Russell Donda ask the reader to make a paradigm shift in his or her understanding of what being "smart" truly encompasses. They suggest that a form of intelligence only partially related to IQ may be responsible for the majority of humanity's advancements. Remarkably, this intelligence, even today, is neither routinely measured nor recognized. Yet, it is this phenomenal mental capacity that enables us to dislodge from behaviors, practices, and habits that restrain progress and breakthroughs. Buttressed with credible science and explained in readable but provocative fashion, this book makes the argument for a form of intelligence sufficiently distinct from IQ to have its own acronym: CI--for creative intelligence. Genius, its authors argue, does not lie solely within the realm of IQ. How effectively we use our capacity to reason divergently and create beneficial advances for ourselves and the world is, they contend, a measure of genius. Heilman is a Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Clinical and Health Psychology who has extensively conducted and written about groundbreaking brain research; as a physician he has treated countless patients. Co-author Donda has devoted more than fifteen years to interpreting, expanding, and translating science into clearly understandable and usable form for non-scientists. Their blend of expertise and relatable, yet provocative writing will combine for an exciting and accessible book that changes the intellectual paradigm as we know it.
Marathon moms--amazing, multitasking women who work, parent, wife and, in their spare time, also run, whether it's around the block or through a 26.2 mile marathon course--are popping up everywhere. In between the 2 hours and 23 minutes it took Paula Radcliffe, mother to 9-month-old Isla, to win the 2007 New York City Marathon and the 5 hours, 29 minutes it took Katie Holmes, a.k.a. Mrs. Tom Cruise and mother to Suri, to cross the line, countless (unphotographed, but not uncelebrated) marathon moms also went the distance. RUN LIKE A MOTHER: HOW TO GET MOVING--AND NOT LOSE YOUR JOB, FAMILY, OR SANITY targets this substantial demographic. Dimity McDowell and Sarah Bowen Shea, both writers, mothers and long-time runners, will make RUN LIKE A MOTHER an engaging conversation on all things running. Sure, it will cover the details most running books should--how to properly build up to the distance without getting injured; how to prep for race day; how to buy the right shoes--but it will approach these topics through the authors' personal experiences, letting the readers realize they've also hit the proverbial walls (in training, in racing, in mothering and in marriage) but lived to tell the tales. Dimity and Sarah virtually trained together for the 2007 Nike Women's Marathon for an assignment for Runner's World magazine. The two successful sports-and-fitness freelance writers chronicled their training with twice-weekly updates on a blog on the runnersworld.com site, which they continue to do, and in a 9-page feature story that appeared in the July 2008 issue. Balancing Dimity's middle-of-the-pack nature with Sarah's fiercely competitive vibe, the authors present both sides of the running coin, appealing to all women who thrive on running.
Yitta Halberstam doesn't need to uncover the meaning of life. She's not out looking for the Holy Grail or the Promised Land. All she's after is a size 8 dress that she can pour her lithe, limber, newly curvaceous body into. But Yitta's a woman whose first wacky weight loss effort was to check into the Pawling Health Manor at the age of 19 where she paid like crazy for the opportunity to...not eat. Before Pawling, she was maybe 30 pounds overweight. Today she's a candidate for gastric bypass. But those hospital gowns never come in plus sizes, so you die of mortification as you're forced to pull on three in the front and three in the back to cover your excess flesh (and that's before you die from the surgery). If they had plus size hospital gowns, she might consider surgery, but until Lane Bryant is called in for a consult, that option is out. Without slicing and dicing, it might be prudent to consider some of the endless other opportunities for weight loss. But how to discipline herself, restrain herself, retrain herself? Hmm...how about a binding book contract? In the spirit of Eat, Pray, Love but without the soulful bits (and the eating), Halberstam's 50 WAYS TO LOSE YOUR BLUBBER: ONE WOMAN'S SEARCH FOR THE ULTIMATE WEIGHT LOSS SECRET will be a serial dieter's hysterical chronicle of a year's worth of experiences with some of the most off-beat and zany techniques of weight control. The bestselling co-author of the Small Miracles series, Halberstam brings all of her talent and warmth, and a huge dose of good humor, to the table (no pun intended) for her latest book.
In August of 2007, Chris Petersen tested positive for HIV. For two weeks, he struggled to deal with the news. He wasn't in a high-risk group, and though he got tested each time a relationship ended, he never anticipated a positive result. Then the unthinkable happened; he was given a second chance. He got his do-over. Two weeks after the initial positive, he went back for the results of the confirmatory blood test. They were negative. A gift. And it might have been as simple as a deep thanks to the universe and on with business as usual. But the previous two weeks had changed everything for him. Since his divorce 14 years before, Chris had been attracted to women based largely on sexual chemistry. Looking at a decade's worth of relationships, he realized that each was shorter than the one before. The sad and tough truth was that he had put his health--his life--at risk for something as transient as lust when what he really wanted was a lasting relationship, a partnership, a sharing of space, time, and life. He came to this conclusion: he could go blindly forward and likely wind up in another dead-end relationship, failing for the same familiar reasons. Or he could go down the harder path and really examine the past and its mistakes. Somewhere in his relationship failures lay the secret that would ensure he didn't wind up a cranky old man alone on a park bench feeding the pigeons. He will detail that scintillating emotional journey in THE WEARY BACHELOR: A MEMOIR OF FAILED RELATIONSHIPS, LESSONS LEARNED, AND ONE MAN'S SEARCH FOR LOVE EVERLASTING. Full of pathos, humor, struggle, and the keys to personal triumph, it will be a chronicle of a sometimes uncomfortable, often amusing, and ultimately insightful process of discovery few men would ever consider undergoing.
At 51, Linda Robinson was a certified professional nurse-midwife and nurse-practitioner. She had worked for the Peace Corps in Malawi, spent time as a public health worker in American Samoa, and eventually settled in Maine with her husband and five children. In 2007, her husband left her unexpectedly and her youngest child had just moved away from home. Alone and lonely, Robinson saw her opportunity to go back to work in Africa. Granted a year's leave of absence from her regular job, she applied to the Nobel Peace Prize winning Doctors Without Borders, and in late summer of last year, she started the long journey from Bar Harbor, Maine, to one of the most remote villages in the Congo: Shamwana. Don't bother trying to find it on Google Maps. GENERAL DELIVERY, CONGO is about the year she spent in that nation. It's about life: about bringing life, about saving life, and about creating life in the face of terror, disease, death, and starvation. Robinson became part of an effort to revive a village, a series of villages, an entire province that had become so devastated by war that women in labor were too exhausted, terrified, and listless to even push. In an area notorious even in Congo for its remoteness, it was the job of her team to be the midwives to everyone: the emissaries of hope and life in a territory desperate to be reborn. Written with Tim Brookes, a commentator on NPR's Sunday Weekend Edition whose work has also appeared in National Geographic, Outside, and American History, GENERAL DELIVERY: CONGO is a magnificent study of the hunger for hope in the saddest of locales and the potential for good work in a troubled world.
Dr. Hans Keirstead has a very real shot at being the man who solves one of the most complex problems in medicine. He is the leader of an elite group of scientists pulling ever nearer to what he calls simply "fixing spinal cords." His group was the first to get permission to work with a pure stem cell line from the National Institutes of Health, the first to successfully use embryonic stem cells to consistently create other types of cells, the first to prove a working spinal cord repair concept in animal studies, and the first to file for permission to conduct human clinical trials using those cells. Those trials, originally scheduled to begin this summer, are being held at this writing by the Food and Drug Administration. If they succeed, it will be without limit. If they fail, there will be plenty to say about what went wrong and what needs to happen next. Kate Willette originally encountered the charismatic genius Keirstead at a conference in Washington that she attended because her husband suffered a spinal cord injury in the spring of 2001. The population of advocates for therapies to alleviate the array of health issues associated with spinal cord injury is not large; over the course of the last seven years Willette has taken her place among a small, determined tribe; Dr. Keirstead agreed to let her tell his story because he knows and trusts her. ELEGANT SOLUTIONS will not be a polemic. It will be an upbeat narrative of overcoming odds and refusing to give up--a hero's tale about an appealing personality with an unlikely drive to do what no one else has done.
Listen, no one wants to be told they flunked their mammogram, but it happens. A lot. And things can get really ugly when that happens. A needle to the milk duct and a cold, sober tissue extraction? It's not exactly Canyon Ranch. Generally speaking, x-rays are the only photos that Eileen Boylen ever found flattering. That was not especially the case on November 14, 2007. That day they wanted her to talk with the doctor. Modeling this season's snappy Johnny, she walked the catwalk down the long hall, assuming a callback wasn't a good thing in the breast industry. There the nice radiologist held up her x-rays, which showed "micro calcifications" in her left breast. It just looked like steel wool with a flashlight behind it, but he seemed sincere so she agreed to go on to the next round. Round 2 was breast cancer. In THANKS FOR THE MAMMARIES, Boylen takes a humorous look at the process from diagnosis to recovery and everything in between. In the course of the last ten months, she managed to face all the fear, anxiety, shock, denial, sometimes painful treatment, and ultimate healing, with a combination of faith and laughter. And despite the adversity, she found cancer to be a positive experience that has provided her with gifts she could never have imagined. A joyful consideration of a not-typically joyful experience, Boylen's book will be a balm and an inspiration to all those who follow in her uncomfortable, unfortunately diagnosed steps.
In the spring of 2003, Maggie Messitt stood in the centre of Acornhoek, South Africa-a village just over the imaginary line that once legally separated white and black-and saw a world unlike anything she had ever experienced, unlike the white community where she'd recently claimed a tent as her home, unlike the urban townships and informal settlements that graced postcards and most foreign tourist itineraries, unlike any community where she'd lived or reported before. This was rural South Africa nearly twelve years after apartheid. TODAY: THE TRUE STORIES OF ONE VILLAGE AND THREE LIVES IN RURAL SOUTH AFRICA invites readers into a community in the midst of change, caught between a traditional past and a western future, a racially charged history and a pseudo-democratic present. Opening a window into the beautifully complicated reality of daily life in rural Africa, TODAY tells the stories of three generations, three individuals tackling life in the Rainbow Nation. This multi-threaded narrative follows a tapestry weaver in her sixties, standing at the crossroads where her faith and the AIDS pandemic meet; a middle-aged sangoma (traditional healer) taking steps to turn her shebeen (a back-door, illegal pub) into a fully-licensed tavern; and a young man taking his matriculation exams, coming of age as one of "Mandela's children," the first academic class educated entirely under democratic governance. Calling to mind the reportage, clear-eyed wisdom, and narrative flair of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family, Messitt's book will be a stunning snapshot of a nation in flux through the eyes of three of its people. (Please note, Jim McCarthy is the agent on this project.)
Nowadays, people are no longer satisfied with just following celebrity gossip; they want to become celebrities themselves. YOUR CLOSE-UP IS READY by Nick White is an irreverent and entertaining self-help book that will educate readers on how to embody the mindset of the rich and famous, and will ensure that all of those long hours with Perez Hilton and TMZ are put to good use. Nick will enlighten readers on how to draw lessons from reality TV shows such as Survivor and The Apprentice to get ahead at work. He will illustrate how to fuse your own style with current Hollywood fashion trends to ensure you are red-carpet ready for every event you attend (even if the event is a school dance recital or dinner at the Red Lobster.) Learn about the various charities you can become involved with by staying aware of all the worthy causes that celebrities are constantly taking on. Become informed about the various spiritual paths of movie stars and learn how to custom design your own spirituality. Everyone deserves to be a star in their own world. Nick is recognized among the L.A. news media as a leading red-carpet journalist, and his articles appear in numerous magazines and on websites, including People, Entertainment Weekly, Us Weekly, E! Online, and Hollywood.com. He has also been featured as an expert on TV Guide Network's Hollywood Romances and Break-Ups. (Please note, Adina Kahn is the agent on this project.)
Amy Plumb never imagined she'd wind up pregnant in her late-thirties, unemployed, and on the verge of divorce in the middle of the French countryside. But that's just what happened to her, and A YEAR IN THE VINES is her first novel, based on her own experiences. It explores her amazing transition from New York businesswoman to fish-out-of-water country mom, and offers readers a smart, funny, very original glimpse into one woman's life on the other side of the pond. Grappling with pregnancy complications, nightmare in-laws, and her husband's conniving ex, Amy is faced with the choice of throwing in the towel and moving back to America or coming up with her own unique survival strategy. Plunged into an alien universe of French country-folk, motherhood in a foreign land, and the challenges of her own deferred coming-of-age, it's amazing Amy survived at all. But survive and thrive she did, and A YEAR IN THE VINES is at times laugh-out-loud funny, and completely charming, as we follow our protagonist's misguided adventures in France. A cross between Emily Giffin and Under the Tuscan Sun, A YEAR IN THE VINES will delight readers with every detail. Please note, Stacey Glick is the agent on this project.)
What do Charles Manson, Oprah Winfrey, Dick Cheney and Clarence Thomas all have in common? They--and many infamous and famous people like them--have all sent letters to "Billy," a 10-year-old character created by Bill Geerhart, a grown man with far too much time on his hands in the 1990s. Rather than squander some extra stamps on the mailing of overdue utility bills, Bill decided to send letters to all nine Supreme Court Justices (and Anita Hill and Judge Ito) in the guise of a child inquiring about the Justices' favorite McDonald's food. The apparent willingness of such esteemed personages to reply to "Billy" resulted in an accelerated and wildly eclectic letter writing campaign that continued--with ebbs and flows--through 2004. Presidents, Vice-Presidents, First Ladies, serial killers, movie and TV stars, corporate heads, government dignitaries, pornographers--nearly everyone responded to "Billy" and many sent signed photos, trading cards and other tokens to amuse their addressee. In May/June 2008, a small sampling of the "Billy Letters" appeared in Radar magazine and generated an immediate and overwhelming response. THE BILLY LETTERS: AN INCORRIGIBLE INNER CHILD'S CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE FAMOUS, INFAMOUS, AND JUST PLAIN BEWILDERED will compile little Billy's letters and their responses, so that you, too, can find out who Janet Reno's favorite crime fighter is: Batman or the Terminator. (Please note, Lauren Abramo is the agent on this project.)
Upon his arrival at the Vienna Correctional Center in Illinois, a prison that once housed notorious inmates such as Larry Hoover, the head of the Gangster Disciples, and former U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds, Tom Kim received a stern warning from a middle-aged pimp who sold 50-cent cheeseburgers smuggled out of the prison kitchen in his crotch. G-Mac told Tom not to join the Karma House unit. However, Tom found the allure of a toilet in his cell too appealing, so he disregarded the warning as he served his six-year sentence for robbing a bank when he was 16 and became a member of a "therapeutic community" where inmates treated one another's emotional issues in group therapy. In THE KARMA HOUSE, Tom embarks on a journey to reunite with and capture the stories of both friends and enemies, 10 years after his parole from prison. He sets out to discover what happened to his former compatriots from the program, many of whom were gang leaders who revealed intimate details of their lives and crimes in weekly meetings that ended in applause. Now a 30-year-old journalist, Tom has written for both newspapers and magazines and covered an eclectic range of topics including crime, national education policy and the Maryland state legislature. THE KARMA HOUSE promises to be an eye-opening, frank and fascinating narrative. (Please note, Lauren Abramo is the agent on this project.)
