NEGOTIATE LIKE THE PROS: A Top Sports Negotiator’s Lessons for Making Deals, Building Relationships, and Getting What You Want. By Kenneth Shropshire. McGraw-Hill. October, 2008. 224 pages. $19.95.
Professor Kenneth Shropshire is a former all-state athlete who grew up in inner city Los Angeles and attended Stanford on a football scholarship. He is a sports fan who can discuss ESPN news with enthusiasm and will knowledgeably forward his opinions on shady college recruitment practices and sports agent scandals.
Sometime in the summer of 1970, a young Jim Athearn stood on Main street in Edgartown and faced one of the most important decisions of his life. The 22-year-old aspiring farmer had just received a few stern words from a market owner who had told him that his corn — the first crop he had ever grown and sold to market — was no good. His ears were full of worms, the owner told him. The words stung like a swarm of angry hornets.
Bittersweet Beginnings:> A Sketchbook of a Great Depression Boyhood by James V. Wyman. Plaidsweed Publishing, Concord, N.H. Illustrated by Linda L. Tillson , 137 pages $19.95
Believe me, being a college president is dauntingly difficult. Better yet, read Steve Trachtenberg’s perceptive and stimulating discussion of his 30 years on the hot seat. Eleven of those years were at the University of Hartford and nineteen at George Washington University. He was a great success at both institutions, which may account for his conclusion that, despite the frustrations, his career was rewarding. The reader of Big Man on Campus will come away not only with a more subtle understanding of the complexities of university leadership, but also with a sense of why Trachtenberg was good at it.
CAMUS, A ROMANCE. By Elizabeth Hawes. Grove Press. July 2009. 304 pages. $25 hardcover.
As an undergrad, Elizabeth Hawes became fascinated with Albert Camus and embarked on an exploration of not only the work but also the world of the brilliant, handsome and charismatic writer and philosopher. Although she was physically half a world away and metaphorically a universe away from her subject, she was determined to somehow enter her idol’s world.
Once children begin connecting with the natural world, it can be hard to stop them. Perhaps that is why the lovely new book by the young artists of Featherstone Center for the Arts, called Animals A-Z, has 49 paintings despite the potentially limiting 26 letters of the alphabet.
It must be tough to pick a name for your second solo cookbook when the first one refers to raising the bar, as in Catherine Walthers's 2007 book, Raising the Salad Bar.
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester, HarperCollins Publishers, 496 pages, illustrated. $27.99.
It would be hard to live on the Vineyard and not have an interest in the Atlantic Ocean. So much of the Island has been colored and shaped by the sea. You can smell the ocean here and feel it all around you.
A new book, Atlantic, is a biography of the ocean. What is most striking about this long book is its scope.
