The new graphite-colored Kindle DX has a bigger screen (9.7 inches), 50% better contrast, 4GB of storage, 3G wireless network, a battery that goes a week between charges and holds up to 3,500 books. Sure, it costs $359.00, but let’s think about those 3,500 books for a few sentences.
Growing up fifty miles from Monroeville, Alabama means I have crossed paths with the reclusive Harper Lee many times. I never met her, mind you. I know her from her famous book, a biography she refused to cooperate with and from her home town, We have traveled the same roads for years. Harper Lee and [...]
There are a lot of new back-to-basics cookbooks being published these days with the Slow Food movement and it’s first through third cousins roaming the aisles at bookstores.
Sail Cat Road, the sequel to No Good End, continues below. It is being posted tweet-by-tweet daily on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ttaylordude). I will post each chapter here (in chronological order). Thank you for your time.
A breeze raked a fallen pine fan across the roof. In the distance, beef cooked on a grill, the aroma following the [...]
Chapter 16
Popping sounds came from relaxing metal under the pecan tree. Jimmy and Gus found no more drivers licenses. Gasoline soaked the earth.
“You’ll want to walk back to the truck,” said Jimmy. “I’m going to roast some pecans.”
Gus walked back to the truck knowing what he meant. Jimmy did not smoke, but he always carried matches [...]
Even with Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” selling 2 million copies in its first week, book sales are down about 4 percent from this time last year. Bestselling authors like Pat Conroy and Mitch Albom are not rescuing the beleaguered trade. Perhaps people are holding of until the holidays (to either buy or give), according [...]
In Rob Walker’s book “Buying In,” along with espousing his thoughts on ‘murketing’ (look it up) he talks about how trust in authority is suffering even more than usual. A cursory Google dig will build a nice little stack of those we don’t trust anymore. Recently, the untrustworthy pile was as tall as a Malaysian [...]
In 1998, writer, Stephen King, became a part-time resident of the Florida Gulf Coast. Now he has set a novel there.
Duma Key is Stephen King’s first Deep South novel. A writer friend of mine said, “If you think he was prolific before, watch him now.” I reminded him that King had been in the South [...]
If you are even remotely familiar with Thomas L. Friedman’s book, “The World Is Flat, A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,” you know about one of the biggest flatteners in the world: Wal-Mart.
If you haven’t read “Hammer of the Gods,” the seminal and raunchy history of Led Zeppelin by Stephen Davis, don’t worry, you have a couple of chances to get a close-up feel for the senior citizen gods of rock at two upcoming events. On November 26, the surviving members of Led Z will take the [...]
Imagine you are in a room with a single lamp. The room is dark. You flip on the lamp. Nothing happens. You immediately think the bulb is blown. But then you fumble around in the dark and see that the lamp is not plugged in. So you plug it into the wall.
This is the first in a series about the contact points that make a company successful. I’m not talking about just branding or marketing success; I’m talking about total success – in sales and operations and customer service and distribution – success in the management offices and the cubes and the janitor’s closet. Most importantly, [...]
I have always been leery of guys with three names. Presidents and serial killers come to mind. Into my doubting field of vision has wandered one more – Michael Gates Gill, and his book “How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else.”
“The key to mega-stock investing is not focusing on the industry, but rather on the entrepreneurial leadership characteristics of the CEO. This strategy is what Renn Capital Group uses to provide, in some cases, soaring returns for investors. You might just find the next Wal-Mart, Starbucks, or eBay.”
-Russell Cleveland, President, RENN Capital Group, Inc.
Selling Out, Up, Down & Dirty
Worm poop is hip. Just ask TerraCycle, Inc magazine’s 2006 “The Coolest Little Start Up In America.” Started by a Princeton dropout (who found that worm droppings helped “certain” kind of plants to grow well in when he was in college), TerraCycle is so hot they’re selling worm doo in [...]