Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Cents-able advice for teenagers Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re too young to make money, say two new books for budding teenage millionaires. How to be a Teenage Millionaire offers the young entrepreneur advice on business ideas, start-up funding, even advertising strategies for kids whose marketable ideas can’t wait until after college. StreetWise: A Guide for Teen Investors says kids can invest the money they make. It teaches teens how to pick stocks, handle the ups and downs of the market, covers tax concerns, and even pitches Wall Street careers teenagers might want to tackle someday. For parents who worry these books will turn their kids into money-hungry land sharks, don’t sweat. While both books offer sound small business and investing advice, the real power of these books is to build money-making and spending confidence for teens who may feel they have no monetary power. Teenage Millionaire says babysitting is a surprisingly effective way to earn income and build a business. StreetWise makes age-old investing advice on compound interest sound appealing. Far from luring your teenager with the promise of glittering riches, these books teach teens to earn and save their money. After reading them, teens might be willing to share their newfound financial wisdom with the rest of the family even their parents.

Cents-able advice for teenagers Don't let anyone tell you that you're too young to make money, say two new books for budding teenage millionaires. How to be a Teenage Millionaire offers the young entrepreneur advice on business ideas, start-up funding, even advertising strategies for kids…

By the mid-20th century, Pablo Picasso’s paintings and sculptures were turning heads in France and Germany, ushering in cubism, a new artistic style that challenged older styles. At this same moment, American art was dominated by a devotion to realism and the old masters, and therefore resistant to and repulsed by the “modern art” of Picasso. In 1939, that all changed when the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in New York City held an exhibit titled “Picasso: Forty Years of His Art,” featuring pieces that two Americans, who never met, worked tirelessly to make available to the public. Hugh Eakin’s Picasso’s War tells the scintillating tale of how John Quinn, Alfred H. Barr Jr. and others brought Picasso’s work to America and changed the face of American art.

Irish American lawyer Quinn championed modernist novels and poetry and avant-garde art, introducing Americans to William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, as well as to Marcel Duchamp’s painting “Nude Descending a Staircase.” A great collector, Quinn had a “growing aversion to what he called ‘dead art,’” Eakin writes, and wanted to promote painters and writers who could “express the values and forces of his own time.” Although he personally never understood cubism, he believed that “American art needs the shock that the work of some of these men will give.” After he met Picasso, the artist started reserving his best work for Quinn, who built a modest collection. Quinn dreamed of opening a museum devoted explicitly to modern art, since the Metropolitan Museum of Art excluded such art as “degenerate.” He never saw his wish come true, however. He died of cancer in 1924.

In 1926, Barr took up Quinn’s vision for such a museum, aided by wealthy patrons who shared Quinn’s hope. Three years later, Barr opened the Museum of Modern Art using pieces from Quinn’s collection, striving to build a collection of premier work by the most important modern artists. He worked incessantly to open a show devoted to Picasso, but he was hampered at several turns by challenges from Parisian art dealers and even by Picasso himself. By the late 1930s, though, as Adolf Hitler’s campaign against so-called degenerate art ramped up and museums and galleries in Paris began removing and hiding certain paintings, Picasso and his dealer, Paul Rosenberg, tried to get as many of the artist’s paintings as possible to America. Such forces enabled Barr to put on his 1939 Picasso exhibit and to secure a place in the American cultural world not only for Picasso but also for the Museum of Modern Art, which flourished following the Picasso exhibit.

Eakin’s rapturous storytelling makes Picasso’s War a spellbinding, page-turning read about this illuminating chapter in cultural history.

Hugh Eakin’s rapturous storytelling makes Picasso’s War a spellbinding, page-turning read about the fight to bring Picasso’s art to America.
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arables reveal possibilities Everyone knows the fable of the slow but steady tortoise and the excitable, ambitious hare. One animal won the famous race, and the other didn’t. Implicitly we know why. Once upon a time lessons were conveyed through stories, passing collected common wisdom from one age to the next without overt preaching.

Stories give us possibilities. In them we travel down the same path traveled by the person telling the story. We see what he saw and heard and felt. We don’t need scientific explanations of the event or statistics to tell us what happened. A story is short-hand to an experience. It is also a lesson.

Three recent business books rely on the short-hand of parables to help business executives consider approaches to leadership challenges. Some things can’t be communicated with statistics; their nature is most clearly revealed with stories. Leadership is one of those illusory qualities.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life is an energetic new book that beautifully illustrates this idea. Written by Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander and his wife, Rosamund Stone Zander, a family therapist, The Art of Possibility whisks together a collection of stories, psychology, and references to classical music for an unusual illustration of the Zanders’ unique personal approach to developing leadership potential. One of the unusual steps they recommend is “Giving an A” individually telling every employee he or she is the most important member of a firm to promote risk-taking and allow team-building. Rule Number 6 don’t take yourself too seriously encourages team members to have fun with work and erase calculating personal competitiveness that destroys goal reaching. As anyone who has been on a team (or even a PTA committee) knows, almost everyone who attends a meeting brings along personal issues. Good leaders, say the Zanders, help people find the possibilities to be the best at whatever they do.

The Zanders’ steps to leadership possibility rely on common sense. We all know the things they say are true, but it’s the stories that best illustrate how to implement positive leadership changes in our own workplace. Like any good parable, it’s that little kernel of the unsaid in Zanders’ stories that allows this book to impart real wisdom. The Zanders tell this story: when he retired from the Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall was asked to name his proudest accomplishment. He replied, “That I did the best I could with what I had.” Zander says Marshall gave himself an A. He gave himself infinite possibilities for success. Through this story the Zanders convey the short-hand message that everyone has the possibility of success.

Learning Journeys: Top Management Experts Share Hard-Earned Lessons on Becoming Great Mentors and Leaders, edited by Marshall Goldsmith, Beverly L. Kaye, and Ken Shelton, shares the Zanders’ enthusiasm for story-telling. More than 35 American business executives relate the hard knocks, mistakes, and plain old-fashioned good luck that made them successful executives.

Written in narrative style, Learning Journeys accomplishes in 37 short chapters what a whole volume of MBA texts cannot tell you: leadership is a life-long process. In Learning Journeys, recognizable names in leadership literature share intimate tales of growth and learning. These journeys may be short stories but all share lessons of found personal truths. Executive trainers recognize stories are the foundation for creating an “aha!” moment for employees.

Collective voices, the authors say, will allow almost everyone to find a resonant personal voice.

Elizabeth Pinchot, author and executive coach, says sometimes it takes an elbow in the ribs to make leadership potential appear. Attending a conference, she relates, noted anthropologist Margaret Mead entered the conference hall, sat down in the chair next to her, and fell asleep. Pinchot says the conference turned toward debunking the ecological agricultural issues Pinchot had studied, but Pinchot was too nervous to raise her voice above the crowd. She started to talk to herself in hushed tones, arguing her point. From Mead’s chair a quick elbow was dispatched to Pinchot’s ribs. “Stand up and make yourself heard,” Mead hissed. Yes, it’s true; sometimes we all need a mental elbow in the ribs.

The Leadership Investment: How the World’s Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage Through Leadership Development, by Robert M. Fuller and Marshall Goldsmith, follows a more traditional business case-study model. The theme of this new book is that companies which develop outstanding leadership within their ranks can weather any business storm. Companies as different and diverse as computer-maker Hewlett-Packard or the World Bank identify key leadership problems and solve those problems to ensure long-term success. The Leadership Investment puts the parables of possibility to the test.

One of six organizations profiled, the World Bank recently restructured its leadership training program to include a Grass Roots Immersion Program. GRIP requires bank employees to live for a week in a poor area potentially served by World Bank programs. Hewlett-Packard developed ethnic and gender diversity programs to attract and retain the best and brightest people to run the company’s many units. Both companies play out the parables of possibility on the real-life playing field.

The Leadership Investmentidentifies leadership potential at a company-wide level, and the stories of change are macro-level parables. What can happen to an organization when fresh bold thinking emerges? The Leadership Investment tells you. Sharon Secor is a business writer based in Nashville.

arables reveal possibilities Everyone knows the fable of the slow but steady tortoise and the excitable, ambitious hare. One animal won the famous race, and the other didn't. Implicitly we know why. Once upon a time lessons were conveyed through stories, passing collected common wisdom…

We may think we know what intelligence is. After all, human intelligence is what enables us to read intriguing nonfiction books such as If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity by animal behavior and cognition researcher Justin Gregg, who works with the Dolphin Communication Project at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. But as Gregg makes clear in his engaging third book, we might not know as much as we think about intelligence. In fact, we might be entirely wrong in our assumptions. It might be time to seriously question “human exceptionalism” and what it means for our species and our planet. To do that, Gregg sets out to answer the question “What good is human intelligence?”

Justin Gregg, author of ‘If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal,’ extols the virtues of stupid animals.

The author begins with a chapter about humans as “why specialists.” Anyone who has been in the presence of a toddler will recognize the “Why?” stage of development. While we may automatically assume that this ability to ask—and discover answers to—every question under the sun is uniformly positive, Gregg asks us to look at this human characteristic through a different lens: “I propose we consider a provocative premise: does asking why give us a biological advantage?” Gregg then takes readers on a time-travel expedition, from 240,000 years ago until today, to demonstrate why certain qualities associated with human intelligence have not, evolutionarily speaking, benefited either our species or the Earth. When humanity’s answers to “why questions” are wrong, Gregg explains, they lead to some truly terrible outcomes, including white supremacy and genocide.

Gregg takes readers on a wide-ranging, entertaining journey of discovery in If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, challenging them to reexamine their assumptions about animals and humans. Along the way, he explores aspects of human experience (such as language use, morality, awareness of death and our capacity to wonder about virtually everything in the universe) and reveals ways in which nonhuman animals experience consciousness themselves. All together, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal is a timely, thought-provoking and often sobering book that will make you look at humans, animals and the future of our planet with new eyes.

According to cognitive scientist Justin Gregg, we might be entirely wrong in our assumption that human intelligence is a good thing.
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Poet Kendra Allen’s Fruit Punch is a sensitive and lyrical collage of the sexuality and violence she experienced during her Dallas childhood. Writing in masterfully composed vignettes as vivid and fleeting as real memories, Allen excavates the anger, powerlessness and wonder she experienced as a young Black girl learning to navigate the world. 

Radiating from Fruit Punch‘s center is a hauntingly precise meditation on the body, as Allen celebrates the vibrancy of childhood play alongside the many ways this joy can be, and was, squashed when she was sexually abused by a family member. It’s a skillful observation of how Black female bodies are hypersexualized, objectified and aggressed starting in childhood. Allen’s mother, L.A., also survived this pattern and feared it would repeat with her own children. Allen writes about how, when she was 9, “L.A. gets terrified for me this year; fearing for my whereabouts and making sure to ask me about my body and who is touching it or had it already been touched.”

What makes Fruit Punch truly dazzling is how Allen hunts for the slippery traces of celebration amid the visceral pain of girlhood. This is not a straightforward lamentation of trauma and the loss of innocence but a fully rendered vision of childhood’s many facets. In that sense, her words both disrupt and sparkle. She doesn’t only experience fear; she also dances in laundromats to Brandy and Britney Spears and breaks the rules of her great-great-uncle’s “No uncrossed ankles / No questions” Southern Baptist church.

Inside this turmoil is Allen’s inescapable sense of irony. As she discusses her childhood abuse for the first time, she shares the fears she has for the next generation: “Especially now since it’s a lot of lil girls in my family. I be scared for them. For they voices. But I had more fun times than not for sure.” Fruit Punch is a startling, unique and deeply poetic work from a writer on the rise.

Fruit Punch is a startling, unique and deeply poetic meditation on sexuality and violence. Kendra Allen is a writer on the rise.
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Like Leno and Letterman, he is a fixture of the after-hours cultural zeitgeist. But instead of delivering monologues and Top Ten Lists, Ted Koppel delves into issues. His name is synonymous with ABC’s Nightline, the respected news show he has anchored for more than 20 years. Esteemed for his journalistic skills, especially his intrepid interviews, Koppel is a preeminent force in TV news. Befitting that status, he has been toasted and roasted (of his decidedly bad hair, the Washington Post declared, "it looks like a Brillo pad ). And, he has journeyed from the small screen to the book shelves.

In his televised reports, Koppel strives for objectivity. Viewers are not privy to his personal thoughts. So he has delivered them in print.

Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public originated as a journal what Koppel calls "an exercise in self-discipline. Speaking by phone from the Nightline offices in Washington, D.C., Koppel explained that on the last day of 1998 he got the idea to keep a day-to-day record of his observations on the events of the following year. "My grandmother was born in 1899. I thought what a joy it would have been, for our family, if there had been a journal detailing the dawn of 1900. Determined to detail the dawn of 2000 for Grace Anne, his wife of 40 years, and their four children, Koppel wrote daily initially alternating between yellow legal pad and laptop. "Then I realized that everything I was writing on the legal pad I was transferring to the laptop. The legal pad was abandoned. Off Camera marks his second print project about Nightline. The first, largely written by former Nightline producer Kyle Gibson (with Koppel contributing) was the 1996 title, Nightline :History in the Making and the Making of Television. It took readers behind the scenes of the show. Off Camera also takes readers behind the scenes of Koppel’s childhood in England, his contemporary family life, and his work as a TV newsman. To Koppel’s dismay, in current news reporting, there is "this tremendous rush to be first with the obvious. His book underscores the perils of that rush, pointing out what happened when CNN broke the news of a shooting at the Armenian parliament. After reporting the death of the prime minister, a CNN anchor went on to report that the prime minister was actually at a hospital, in critical condition. (He did die, but it was never made clear when.) "It was a perfect example of all that is wrong with television’s electronic tail wagging the editorial dog, writes Koppel.

After all, he elaborated, "Journalism entails more than focusing a camera on an event. It entails providing some kind of context. Koppel also voices his concerns about the racism inherent in our society. (He once quizzed five of his black Nightline colleagues and found they had all been behind bars, if only in a holding cell.) Then there is Koppel’s theory about the Vannatizing of America, as in Vanna White, the beautiful game show personality who attained her fame without offering up opinions. "This, I believe, is the root of her popularity. We are able to project on her whatever we please, and, therefore, find her sympathetic, writes Koppel, who wryly wonders if George W. Bush’s popularity is likewise due to the Vannatizing of America. He also questions Bush’s continued refusal to squarely answer questions pertaining to rumors of possible drug use. Koppel, who has done numerous shows about this country’s correctional institutions and their inhabitants believes Bush owes the public the truth. After all, he is governor of a state known for dispensing tough penalties, in the form of stiff prison sentences, to drug users.

"A lot of the offenders are young people who are not going to be finding themselves on the path to the presidency. In fact, their options will be severely limited after they have served 10 to 15 years. As for the future: he is not yet sure how the internet will ultimately impact news. He worries that there are no watchdog agencies to make sure cyberspace news sites abide by "professional standards. Until that day comes, he advises news junkies to stick with solid news sources that are unafraid to weigh in late on a story. "The New York Times has retained its [lofty] reputation. I think they’d rather be beaten on a story than be inaccurate, said Koppel. Without skipping a beat, he added, "And so would I. Pat H. Broeske explores the worlds of crime and punishment as a segment producer for Court TV’s Anatomy of Crime.

 

Like Leno and Letterman, he is a fixture of the after-hours cultural zeitgeist. But instead of delivering monologues and Top Ten Lists, Ted Koppel delves into issues. His name is synonymous with ABC's Nightline, the respected news show he has anchored for more than…

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