‘Where There’s a Will’: Closing Arguments

I have never had the pleasure of having lunch with Sir John Mortimer, but I can imagine the pleasure it must be. Not only has he written all those volumes of stuff (novels, plays, memoirs and many, many Rumpole stories), which one might discuss over the claret, but he has a mind that in its independence, imaginativeness and sheer good humor must have few equals. Now that he has written ”Where There’s a Will,” which contains his testament and advice about the good life, we can all share several delightful hours with him. So even if the invitation to lunch never comes — and one must be realistic about these things — its delights can be imagined.

By ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
New York Times
Published: June 5, 2005

iCon Steve Jobs

iCon Steve Jobs : The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business

Lightning never strikes twice, but Steve Jobs has, transforming modern culture first with the Macintosh and more recently with the iPod. He has dazzled and delighted audiences with his Pixar movies. And he has bedeviled, destroyed, and demoralized hundreds of people along the way. Steve Jobs is the most interesting character of the digital age.

What a long, strange journey it has been. With the mainstream success of the iPod, Pixar’s string of hits and subsequent divorce from Disney, and Steve’s triumphant return to Apple, his story is better than any fiction. Ten years after the leading maverick of the computer age and the king of digital cool, crashed from the height of Apple’s meteoric rise, Steve Jobs rose from ashes in a Machiavellian coup that only he could have orchestrated-and has now become more famous than ever.

In this encore to his classic 1987 unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs-a major bestseller- Jeffrey Young examines Jobs’ remarkable resurgence, one of the most amazing business comeback stories in recent years. Drawing on a wide range of sources in Silicon Valley and Hollywood, he details how Jobs put Apple back on track, first with the iMac and then with the iPod, and traces Jobs’ role in the remarkable rise of the Pixar animation studio, including his rancorous feud with Disney’s Michael Eisner.

* Written with insider scoops and no-holds-barred style

* Based on hundreds of highly unauthorized interviews with Jobs’ nearest and dearest

* New information on the acrimonious parting between Eisner and Jobs, the personal vendetta behind the return to Apple, and the future of iPod and the music industry

Read more about this book

The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth

Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth
by Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro

The politics of taxation can sometimes be gripping for a nation’s citizens, but not often: the arguments tend to be too technical when they are true, and too obviously bogus when they are false, to sustain public interest for long. By extension, the politics of another country’s tax system is unlikely to be of much interest to anyone with any sort of normal life. Listening to the ins and outs of other people’s fiscal battles can be like listening to other people’s dreams: interminable and almost completely unreal. Death by a Thousand Cuts is something different. It tells the story of the campaign to repeal the estate tax (what we would call inheritance tax) in the United States, which culminated in the inclusion of the measure in George Bush’s massive tax-cutting legislation of 2001.

Tax Breaks for Rich Murderers
David Runciman
London Review of Books
Vol. 27 No. 11 dated 2 June 2005

YOU: The Owner’s Manual : An Insider’s Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger

YOU: The Owner’s Manual : An Insider’s Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger
by Michael F. Roizen, Mehmet Oz

Between your full-length mirror and high-school biology class, you probably think you know a lot about the human body. While it’s true that we live in an age when we’re as obsessed with our bodies as we are with celebrity hairstyles, the reality is that most of us know very little about what chugs, churns, and thumps throughout this miraculous, scientific, and artistic system of anatomy. Yes, you’ve owned your skin-covered shell for decades, but you probably know more about your cell-phone plan than you do about your own body. When it comes to your longevity and quality of life, understanding your internal systems gives you the power, authority, and ability to live a healthier, younger, and better life.

YOU: The Owner’s Manual challenges your preconceived notions about how the human body works and ages, then takes you on a tour through all of the highways, back roads, and landmarks inside of you. After taking a quiz that tests your body of knowledge, you’ll learn about all of your blood-pumping, food-digesting, and keys-remembering systems and organs.

Just as important, you’ll get the facts and advice you need to keep your body running long and strong. You’ll find out how diseases start and how they affect your body — as well as advice on how to prevent and beat conditions that threaten your quality of life. Complete with exercise tips, nutritional guidelines, simple lifestyle changes, and alternative approaches, You: The Owner’s Manual gives you an easy, comprehensive, and life-changing how-to plan for fending off the gremlins of aging. To top it off, you’ll also get the great-tasting and calorie-saving Owner’s Manual Diet — a thirty-recipe eating plan that’s designed with only one goal in mind: to help you live a younger life.

Welcome to your body. Why don’t you come on in and take a look around?

Read an excerpt

Them : A Memoir of Parents

Them : A Memoir of Parents
by Francine du Plessix Gray

Them: A Portrait of Parents is a beautifully written homage to the extraordinary lives of two fascinating, irrepressible people who were larger than life emblems of a bygone age. Written with honesty and grace by the person who knew them best, this generational saga is a survivor’s story. Tatiana and Alexander survived the Russian Revolution, the fall of France, and New York’s factory of fame. Their daughter, Francine, survived them.

Tatiana du Plessix, the wife of a French diplomat, was a beautiful, sophisticated “white Russian” who had been the muse of the famous Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Alexander Liberman, the ambitious son of a prominent Russian Jew, was a gifted magazine editor and aspiring artist. As part of the progressive artistic Russian émigré community living in Paris in the 1930s, the two were destined to meet. They began a passionate affair, and the year after Paris was occupied in World War II they fled to New York with Tatiana’s young daughter, Francine.

There they determinedly rose to the top of high society, holding court to a Who’s Who list of the midcentury’s intellectuals and entertainers. Flamboyant and outrageous, bold and brilliant, they were irresistible to friends like Marlene Dietrich, Salvador Dalí, and the publishing tycoon Condé Nast. But to those who knew them well they were also highly neurotic, narcissistic, and glacially self-promoting, prone to cut out of their lives, with surgical precision, close friends who were no longer of use to them.

The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life

The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life
by Steve Leveen

Lately, this is my favorite kind of book. Short, 123 pages. Small, it fits nicely into your hands with paperback margins. Readable, you can read it in one night, or savor it over several nights, just before you go to bed.

No one, it seems, has the time or energy to read anymore. Yet it remains an activity we desire and feel enriched by long after we have added the book to our bookshelves.

The subtitle of Steve Leveen’s new book reads, “How to get more books in your life and more life from your books.” Leveen, for those who don’t know, is the founder of Levenger, a company that specializes in offering “tools for serious readers.”

As we head into the summer months, this book is a perfect companion for the beach.

Read more

Daughter of Heaven : A Memoir with Earthly Recipes

Daughter of Heaven : A Memoir with Earthly Recipes
by Leslie Li

A powerful, touching memoir of a Chinese-American woman and her Chinese grandmother by an extraordinarily talented author who has drawn comparisons to Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Leslie Li belongs to the illustrious Li family of Guilin, China. Her grandfather, Li Zongren, was China’s first democratically elected vice president, to whom Chiang Kai-shek handed over control of the country when he fled to Formosa in 1949. Leslie’s father was studying in the U.S. where he met and married Leslie’s American-born mother.

In 1958, Leslie’s grandmother Nai-nai came to live with her son’s family in New York, bringing with her a new world of sights, smells, and tastes. Nai-nai’s wonderfully exotic new cooking opened Leslie’s heart and mind to her Chinese heritage and to the world. As Leslie grew, taste became the stronghold of memory, and food the keeper of culture.

It was through her grandmother’s traditional Chinese cuisine that Leslie bridged the cultural divide in an America where she is a minority—and bridged the growing gap at home between her traditionalist father and her progressive mother. Sprinkled throughout Leslie’s poignant and moving memoir are recipes from Nai-nai’s kitchen that add a delicious dimension to a heartwarming tale.

Remembrance: James D. Houston, Writer On Eskimo Life

Confessions of an Igloo Dweller
by James Houston

From 1948 to 1962, Canadian artist-writer James Houston lived among Inuit residents of Arctic Quebec. (He uses the term Inuit rather than Eskimo, which has recently fallen out of favor.) He was one of the first white men to appreciate the value of Inuit carvings and initiated a program to gather, sell, and display in galleries the ivory, antler, whalebone, and stone artifacts.

Sprinkled in the text are 40 of his drawings, which illustrate such commonly used items as a seal-oil lamp, copper-mine ulu, and goose-wing brush. Reading Houston’s memoirs, you become inspired by his joy at living in and learning about the Canadian Arctic.

Winning by Jack and Suzy Welch

Winning
by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch

Winning by Jack and Suzy Welch is destined to become the bible of business for generations to come. It clearly and succinctly lays out the answers to the most difficult, important questions people face both on and off the job. Welch’s objective is to speak to people at every level of the organization, in companies large and small. His audience is everyone from line workers to college students and MBAs, from project managers to senior executives. He describes his core business principles and devotes most of Winning to the real “stuff” of work. Welch’s optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind set is riveting. His goal is to help anyone and everyone who has a passion for success.

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
by Thomas L. Friedman

When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter “Y2K to March 2004,” what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world’s two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalization? And with this “flattening” of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?

In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The World Is Flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists.