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Microtrends
by Mark Penn
"The ideas in his book will help you see the world in a new way." —Bill Clinton
"Mark Penn has a keen mind and a fascinating sense of what makes America tick, and you see it on every page of Microtrends."—Bill Gates
In 1982, readers discovered Megatrends. In 2000, The Tipping Point entered the lexicon. Now, in Microtrends, one of the most respected and sought-after analysts in the world articulates a new way of understanding how we live. Mark Penn, the man who identified "Soccer Moms" as a crucial constituency in President Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign, is known for his ability to detect relatively small patterns of behavior in our culture-microtrends that are wielding great influence on business, politics, and our personal lives. Only one percent of the public, or three million people, is enough to launch a business or social movement. Relying on some of the best data available, Penn identifies more than 70 microtrends in religion, leisure, politics, and family life that are changing the way we live. Among them: People are retiring but continuing to work. Teens are turning to knitting. Geeks are becoming the most sociable people around. Women are driving technology. Dads are older than ever and spending more time with their kids than in the past.You have to look at and interpret data to know what's going on, and that conventional wisdom is almost always wrong and outdated. The nation is no longer a melting pot. We are a collection of communities with many individual tastes and lifestyles. Those who recognize these emerging groups will prosper. Penn shows readers how to identify the microtrends that can transform a business enterprise, tip an election, spark a movement, or change your life. In today's world, small groups can have the biggest impact. |
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Palestine Peace Not Apartheid
by Jimmy Carter
It's hard to use standard criteria to assess this book. Former President Carter is not a very good reader; his tone is flat, and his pronunciation sometimes difficult. Nor is he a literary stylist; there is neither music nor imagery in his down-to-earth sentences. But Carter feels strongly that what he has to say is absent from public discourse and policy decisions, and he knows that his status and voice provide authority to what might otherwise be rejected out of hand as anti-Israeli propaganda. He explains that Israel has never complied with U.N. Resolution 242 and others; has never lived up to its agreements made over the years in Washington, Oslo and elsewhere; continues to grab land through settlements and placement of a wall well within Palestinian territory; and still imprisons thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. While pointing out many murderous and counterproductive moves of Arafat and various Palestinian groups, he pointedly lays the blame for the current situation at the door of the Israelis and their Washington backers, with special venom for Bush and Rice, who have been mute on the subject for six years—even during the invasion of Lebanon. Many will dispute his facts and counter his views, but Carter maintains that if we really want to understand and promote change in this region, we must know both sides of the story. (PW Review) |
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The Word and The Bomb
by Hanif Kureishi
This is a collection of Kureishi's most controversial and though-provoking writing on the gulf between fundamentalist Islam and Western values. Over the past 10 years, Hanif Kureishi has charted the gradual widening of the gulf between fundamentalist Islam and Western values. Starting with The Black Album, Kureishi portrayed the ongoing argument between Islam and Western liberal values, between Islamic certainty and Western rational scepticism. By the time he was writing the short story, My Son The Fanatic, the break was complete - there was no longer any attempt by the fundamentalists to find any common ground with Western culture. The outbreak of the Iraq war and its aftermath, plus the recent bombings in London, have stimulated Kureishi to write further about this great divide between the East and the West, and this volume collects Kureishi's writings from the past 10 years which have dealt with this subject, charting Islam's disengagement from dialogue with the West. The volume also contains a new piece, written especially for this book, which brings Kureishi's analysis of the situation right up to date. |
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Certainty
by Madeleine Thien
Gail Lim, a producer of radio documentaries in present-day Vancouver, finds herself haunted by events in her parents' past in war-torn Malaysia, a past which remains a mystery that fiercely grips her imagination. Gail's father, Matthew, grew up under the terrifying shadow of war in Japanese-occupied Sanddakan where he witnessed his father being shot by the soldiers with whom he had collaborated. He and his friend Ani wander the Leila Road and the jungle fringe trying to put the horror out of their minds. Eventually the war shatters their families and Matthew and Ani are separated. Years later they meet briefly, only to be torn apart again, but the legacy of their powerful connection and the life-changing secrets they shared, affects Matthew's wife, Clara, in unexpected ways. |
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I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train
by Peter Hobbs
Following on from the spectacular critical success of Peter Hobbs's debut novel, here is a wonderful collection of comic, heartfelt, grotesque, other-worldly and fantastical stories. A divorced mother in Florida reflects on the life that is slipping away from her. A young zoologist sees the world from the business end of his zebras. There's the story of a group of car-washers based on a south London supermarket forecourt. And Pythagoras explains just what exactly was his problem with triangles. In this thoughtful, compassionate and wildly inventive debut collection Hobbs recalls work from writers as diverse as J. G. Ballard, David Foster Wallace and Toby Litt. |
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Family Romance
by John Lanchester
Family Romance is a beautifully written memoir in which John Lanchester joins the dots of his parents' history, their extraordinary secrets and the shape of their shared life. From his grandparents' beginnings in rural Ireland and colonial Rhodesia, Lanchester navigates through his parents lives: his father Bill's devastating war-time separation from his parents; his mother Julia's tragic first love, her decision to become a nun and her adoption of a new identity. Lanchester illuminates their characters and Julia's motives with moving insight. Family Romance is a book about reticence and its costs. It is a story about love and fearing the strength of your own feelings; about family ties, and the flight from family, and the deep human need to keep secrets. |
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Ten Days in the Hills
by Jane Smiley
It is the morning after the Academy Awards. Max, an award-winning writer and his lover, Elena, are hosts to a house full of guests including their daughter, a movie star, a healer and an agent. Over the course of the next ten life-changing days, they share stories of Hollywood, watch movies and become entangled by the pool. Sparks fly and tension mounts as this unputdownable tale of love, war, sex, politics, friendship and betrayal moves towards its redemptive end. |
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Matters of Life & Death
by Bernard MacLaverty
A new book of stories from Bernard MacLaverty is a cause for celebration, but Matters of Life and Death is more than that, as it is - without question - the finest collection yet from a contemporary master of the form. Beginning with the sudden, nauseating terror of a family caught up in an explosion of shocking sectarian violence and ending with the white-out of an Iowa blizzard and a different kind of fear, Matters of Life and Death is a book about bonds and connections, made and broken, secret and known. Vivid, beautifully controlled and written with effortless skill and empathy, these stories are object lessons in the art of short fiction. |
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Walk the Blue Fields
by Claire Keegan
A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. A Harvard student flies south to celebrate his birthday at his step-father's condominium by the sea. While the scent of hay drifts up from neighbouring fields, a teenage immigrant articulates the reason for her going. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair. In her long-awaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past, and it is against this landscape that the stories of Walk the Blue Fields so beautifully articulate all the yearnings of the human heart. |
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