Common Purpose: How Great Leaders Get Organizations to Achieve the Extraordinary by Joel Kurtzman
In our current economic situation we look to leadership for answers and solutions. This is especially true in the world of business and commerce. How are some businesses able to flourish, we wonder, while so many others are hopelessly failing? And what leadership qualities will companies need to succeed coming out of this recession? In COMMON PURPOSE: How Great Leaders Get Organizations to Achieve the Extraordinary, Joel Kurtzman argues that the creation of common purpose, a new concept, is the essence of leadership. In framing his cogent explanation, the author draws upon two decades of research, hundreds of interviews, personal observation, and interactions with countless leaders.
Common purpose occurs when a leader is able to get a group to internalize an organizations’ values, tools, objectives, and aspirations enabling them to work toward one goal. In Kurtzman’s framework, an effective leader does not separate himself from the group that he leads. Instead, he acts as the glue that holds the organization together. Common purpose enables a leader to impel others to act without directing their every move. It encourages autonomous actions around common goals.
Common purpose is what turns me into we.
Kurtzman explains many different ways in which a common purpose creates performance. Using well-known, as well as personal examples, Kurtzman advises ways to achieve this goal. These are just a few examples:
Emphasize One Goal – Gordon Bethune, CEO of Continental Airlines, recognized that his customers valued on-time performance. He set this as the measure of success for the company. In order to underscore this goal, Bethune decided to send every employee a check every time the company was first in on-time arrival. In the different cities, pilots, flight attendants, agents, mechanics, baggage handlers, and everyone else united together to achieve this one goal, while reinforcing the feeling of “one team”.
Become Flat, Instead of Hierarchical – In a hierarchical organization information supplied by subordinates is looked at with condescension by individuals at the top. In the case of Enron, Sherron Watkins signaled to Ken Lay, the chairman of the organization, that something was wrong with the company’s partnerships and the way they were kept off the books. Lay ignored the information due to the rationalization that if something was wrong, he, as chairman, would know. Creating different levels of importance in an organization usually works against common purpose.
Leaders at All Levels – When a company has a common purpose, all employees have an understanding of what the organization stands for, enabling them to make a decision independently based on that information. Simon Cooper, president and CEO of Ritz-Carlton, calls this “scriptless service”. With such a diverse clientele, employees cannot simply operate by choosing from a limited number of preselected solutions to guest requests. A chambermaid must be empowered to decide on her own volition whether to give a guest extra towels based upon what was used the night before.
Lead by Listening – FM Global’s chairman and CEO, Shivan Subramaniam, takes every opportunity to listen to his employees. He eats in the company’s cafeteria and often sits with random groups of FM Global employees. Subramaniam puts himself in the loop of what is going on with the company. It also makes him accessible to his employees, in case they wish to share their ideas.
The goal of an organization is to achieve maximum performance consistently. As Kurtzman so deftly explains without a strong common purpose, there will be no excellence in execution.
Joel Kurtzman
Joel Kurtzman
Joel Kurtzman is chairman of the Kurtzman Group, a research and consulting firm focusing on issues relating to knowledge management, strategy, economic development, global risk, and thought leadership. He is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute and publisher of The Milken Institute Review, a member of the editorial board of MIT Sloan Management Review, and a senior fellow at Wharton’s SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management. He is also an advisor to the World Economic Forum and to the U.S. Council on Competitiveness. Previously, he was the editor of Harvard Business Review, founder and editor of strategy + business magazine, a columnist at Fortune, and an editor and columnist at The New York Times. For more than 30 years, Kurtzman has interviewed, worked with, and consulted to the CEOs of some of the world’s largest companies.
MBA in a Book: Mastering Business with Attitude by Joel Kurtzman
MBA in a Book includes practical ideas from the best brains in Business
A sharp, jargon-free guide to the core curriculum of an MBA program, MBA in a Book shows how to master the big ideas of business and use them in a practical way to build and enhance career success.
Great business thinkers such as Michael Porter, Rosabeth Kanter, and Bill George of Harvard Business School; Paul Argenti of the Tuck School at Dartmouth; Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale; Peter Senge of MIT; the entrepreneur and inventor Dean Kamen; and the financial innovator Michael Milken are just a few of the best brains in business, providing the intellectual nourishment that will help you play the game of business at the highest level.
Malacca - mention it, and the first 3 ’things’ I can think of are, A Famosa, Nyonya and the Chicken Rice Ball. I’ll stop at 3 or you’ll be skimming through a 101 list instead. I love going to Melaka occasionally as some of you professed in your answers too.
There’s something about stepping into multiple sites of yesteryears /centuries, isn’t it? One of my personal favourite photographs is the one taken of me sitting next to a canon. I’m not a super-duper History student, just reading more of the bits I like, but I did mentioned to a colleague the other day, that as a 12 year old, I’d read a lot of (fictional) war stories in the local library, thus the fascination for museums and ruins, I supposed.
Nyonya comes to mind because, my roommate and coursemate in my uni days was one. I am mostly fascinated by the language or slang of her BM. Distinctively of the Peranakan community. The babas and the nyonyas also loved to ‘berpantun’ and I am fascinated by their traditional outfit, especially the baju kebaya.
And Chicken Rice Ball.. yup..little did we know that rice rolled into the shape of little balls on our plates would become a famous must-try dish in this little historical town.
Excuse my little ranting. I’m a little choco-deprived today.
We’ve 5 copies of the book, 2009’s Tourism Guide Book on Malacca to give away. It was kinda difficult to choose the winners coz we liked more than 5 entries, and so eenie meenie minie moe.. (mini draw) the winners are:
* Farah * Ahmad Shahrim Abd Rashid * Betty *
TH Lee * Cindy
Winners will be notified via e-mail by Monday.
Thank you for participating and May you all have a Merry May.
Many books have been banned for not conforming to the political, religious or moral codes of their country.
Here, we shall be looking at ten controversial books which may have been banned around the world.
Although you’re unlikely to be jailed these days, you might have been once so read carefully.
1. Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed in Florence, Italy; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960. A private edition was issued by Inky Stephensen’s Mandrake Press in 1929. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an aristocratic woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of unprintable words at the time.
The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence’s own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood in Nottinghamshire where he lived for a while. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with “Tiger”, a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story. Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition. It has been published in three different versions.
2. Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959.
The book was originally published with the title The Naked Lunch in Paris in July 1959 by Olympia Press. Because of US obscenity laws, a complete American edition by Grove Press did not follow until 1962. It was titled Naked Lunch and was substantially different from the Olympia Press edition, because it was based on an earlier 1958 manuscript in Allen Ginsberg’s possession.
The article “the” in the title was never intended by the author, but added by the editors of the Olympia Press 1959 edition. Nonetheless The Naked Lunch remained the title used for the 1968 and 1974 Corgi Books editions, and the novel is often known by the alternative name, especially in the UK where these editions circulated.
The novel was included in Time magazine’s “100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005″.
David Cronenberg released a film of the same title based upon the novel and other Burroughs writings in 1991.
3. Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury which was first published in 1953.
The novel presents a future American society in which the masses are hedonistic and critical thought through reading is outlawed. The central character, Guy Montag, is employed as a “fireman” which, in this future, means “bookburner”. The number “451″ refers to the temperature at which book paper combusts. Although sources contemporary with the novel’s writing gave the temperature as 450 °C, Bradbury is believed to have thought “Fahrenheit” made for a better title; however, in an introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of the novel, Bradbury states that a person he spoke with at the local fire department said “Book-paper catches fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit”. The “firemen” burn them “for the good of humanity”. Written in the early years of the Cold War, the novel is a critique of what Bradbury saw as issues in American society of the era.
4. Lolita
Lolita (1955) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris, later translated by the author into Russian and published in 1958 in New York. The book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle-aged Humbert Humbert, becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl named Dolores Haze.
After its publication, Nabokov’s Lolita attained a classic status, becoming one of the best-known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name “Lolita” has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious adolescent girl. The novel was adapted to film in 1962 and again in 1997.
Lolita is listed in the TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It is fourth on the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.
5. Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert’s first published novel and considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor’s wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel’s true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was notoriously a perfectionist about his writing and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste (“the right word”).
The novel was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between October 1, 1856 and December 15, 1856, resulting in a trial in January 1857 that made the story notorious. After the acquittal on February 7, 1857, it became a bestseller when it was published as a book in April 1857, and now stands virtually unchallenged not only as a seminal work of Realism, but as one of the most influential novels ever written.
A 2007 poll of contemporary authors, published in a book entitled The Top Ten, cited Madame Bovary as one of the two greatest novels ever written, second only to Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
6. The Prince
The Prince (Italian: Il Principe) is a political treatise by the Italian public servant and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. Originally called De Principatibus (About Principalities), it was originally written in 1513, but not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli’s death. The Prince was one of the first works of modern philosophy, in which pragmatic ends, as opposed to teleological concepts, are the purpose. The treatise is not representative of the work published during his lifetime, but it is the most remembered, and the work responsible for bringing “Machiavellian” into wide usage as a pejorative term.
7. A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Ernest Hemingway, first published in 1929. The novel is told through the point of view of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American serving as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I. The title is taken from a poem by 16th century English dramatist George Peele.
The novel is said to have been written at the home of Hemingway’s in-laws in Piggott, Arkansas and at the home of friends of Hemingway’s wife Pauline Pfeiffer W. Malcolm and Ruth Lowry home at 6435 Indian Lane, Mission Hills, Kansas while she was awaiting delivery of their baby.
The novel is about Hemingway’s World War I experiences and his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky in Milan. His wife Pauline underwent a caesarean section as Hemingway was writing about Catherine Barkley’s childbirth.
On the surface, A Farewell to Arms is about the tragic romance between an American soldier Frederic Henry, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. Below the surface, the novel is about World War I and individual tragedy within the larger picture of greater tragedy. The novel portrays the cynicism of soldiers, the displacement of populations. Hemingway’s stature as an American writer was secured with the publication of A Farewell to Arms. A Farewell to Arms was adapted to film in 1932 and again in 1957.
8. The 120 Days of Sodom
The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinism (alternatively The School of Licentiousness) (Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage) is a novel by the French writer and nobleman Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, written in 1785. It tells the story of four wealthy male libertines who resolve to experience the ultimate sexual gratification in orgies. To do this, they seal themselves away for four months in an inaccessible castle with a harem of 46 victims, mostly young male and female teenagers, and engage four women brothel keepers to tell the stories of their lives and adventures. The women’s narratives form an inspiration for the sexual abuse and torture of the victims, which gradually mounts in intensity and ends in their slaughter.
The work remained unpublished until the twentieth century. In recent times it has been translated into many languages, including English, Japanese and German. Due to its themes of sexual violence and extreme cruelty, it has frequently been banned.
9. Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four or sometimes unofficially abbreviated to 1984 by George Orwell, published in 1949, is a dystopian novel about the totalitarian regime of the Party, an oligarchical collectivist society where life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, public mind control, and the voiding of citizens’ rights. In the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), protagonist Winston Smith is a civil servant responsible for perpetuating the Party’s propaganda by revising historical records to render the Party omniscient and always correct, yet his meager existence disillusions him into rebellion against Big Brother, which leads to his arrest, torture, and conversion.
As literary political fiction, 1984 is a classic novel of the social science fiction sub-genre, thus, since its publication in 1949, the terms and concepts of Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Memory hole, et cetera, became contemporary vernacular, including the adjective Orwellian, denoting George Orwell’s writings and totalitarianism as exposited in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (1945).
Wales Book of the Year prizes are awarded annually to the best Welsh and English language works in the fields of fiction and literary criticism by Welsh or Welsh interest authors. Established in 1992, the awards are currently administered by the Academi, and supported by the Arts Council of Wales, Welsh Assembly Government and the Welsh Books Council.
The longlist of ten works in each language is published in April and the shortlist of three works in each language at the Hay Festival in May. The winners are announced in June. Since 2006, the winners have each received £10,000. From 2007, four runners-up (two in each language) also each receive £1000. In 2009, Media Wales sponsored a voted “People’s Choice” award for the English-language works.
The 2010 18th Wales Book of the Year longlist
From the tales of the Mabinogi to an account of a rural Welsh childhood in the 1920s and the diary of a modern-day police officer on the beat, the longlist for the Wales Book of the Year features an eclectic mix of subject matter and genres.
The longlists for the eighteenth Wales Book of the Year – Wales’s premier award for literature – were announced today, Tuesday 20 April at The Management Centre, Bangor Business School, North Wales. The awards, worth £10,000 to the winners, are presented to the best books of the year in the English and Welsh language.
The English language judges are poet and lecturer at the University of Wales, Ian Gregson (chair); fiction writer, James Hawes and broadcaster Sara Edwards.
The list includes debut novels from Mike Thomas and Terri Wiltshire; Alun Trevor’s memoir of a Welsh childhood; travel writing by Horatio Clare; short stories from Emyr Humphreys and poetry from Jasmine Donahaye, Philip Gross and Richard Marggraf Turley. Peter Lord is nominated for his scholarly account of the history of Welsh painting and Nikolai Tolstoy for his analysis of the origins of the Mabinogi.
On Sunday 6 June, the shortlist of three books in each language will be announced at the Guardian Hay Festival. The winners will be announced on Wednesday 30 June at a gala dinner at St David’s Hotel, Cardiff where the winners in each language will receive a cheque for £10,000 and four runners-up will each receive £1,000.
Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas
Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas
Meet Jacob Smith. Your good-old British policeman. The sort revered around the world. But Jacob’s no ordinary ‘tit-wearing’ beat bobby. He’s a tactical firearms officer – a handsome, popular, financially secure specialist, no less. He’s also married, with two children; a connoisseur of fine cinema, who also enjoys the occasional hit from his expansive collection of do-it-yourself ‘art’ DVDs (the latest of which was ‘borrowed’ from a flat during a drugs warrant); an amateur historian, with a keen interest in the Vietnam War. And he does like to keep himself in shape, hence the rather large steroid habit – and the even larger amount of money he owes to his dealer. And did we mention he’s partial to women’s feet? That the local shoe shop is his lap-dance palace? And the girlfriend, his little Christmas treat to himself, who’s desperately trying to shrug him off now it’s the New Year? Or what about his parents – do we really need to go there? And now his family and friends are starting to worry about our Jake …and his police superiors are increasingly taking notice of the way he conducts himself. As you can see, Jake’s a very busy boy. And his life is about to get a lot more complicated…”Pocket Notebook” is the debut novel from serving police officer Mike Thomas. An angry black comedy, it follows Jacob’s very public breakdown and subsequent fall from grace, all of which he meticulously records in his police notebook.
Carry Me Home by Terri Wiltshire
Carry Me Home by Terri Wiltshire
Lander, Alabama, 1904. When young Emma Scott claims she has been raped by a ‘black hobo’, a chain of events is triggered that will affect generations to come.
In modern-day Lander, Canaan Phillips has fled her abusive husband and returned to Lander and her fierce Southern Baptist grandmother, who brought her up after her mother’s suicide. Canaan’s one friend during her childhood was her grandmother’s simple brother, Luke. Now frail and elderly, Luke is still living in the corncrib shack that has been his home for thirty years.
In early-twentieth-century Lander, Emma Scott has taken an instant and violent dislike to her new child – a white-skinned boy named Luke. Abused and neglected, Luke eventually befriends Squeaky, a black boy whose family farms nearby. When tragedy strikes, Luke takes to the railroad, and as he enters manhood on the rails, we begin to discover the truth behind the events that led to his birth.
In the twentieth century, Canaan, too, is slowly coming to terms with her painful past. And, with the help of her adored Uncle Luke, she is learning to love again.
This is a heart-rending and luminous story about loyalty, hardship, love and friendship. It is also a reminder that goodness can prevail even through the cruellest hardships.
The Songbird Is Singing by Alun Trevor
The Songbird Is Singing by Alun Trevor
Based on the life of the author’s father, this narrative follows the famous Welsh tenor Jabez Trevor as he tours North America with the Welsh Imperial Singers. The story is recalled by the 80-year-old Arthur as he reminiscences with his brother, Alun, about their childhood. They eagerly awaited news from their father’s trips, enthusiastically reading about the 1920s and airships, prohibition, Al Capone, talkies, gramophones, and the Empire State Building through postcards and letters. Presents would arrive from Chicago, Winnipeg, and New York, offering visions of the world as seen through their father’s eyes. Haunting and beautiful, this music-filled memoir tells with joyful immediacy of a time long gone, exacting the thrill and excitement of the world before the Great Depression.
A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare
A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare
From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, across two continents and fourteen countries – this epic journey is nothing to swallows, they do it twice a year. But for Horatio Clare, writer and birdwatcher, it is the expedition of a lifetime. Along the way he discovers old empires and modern tribes, a witch-doctor’s recipe for stewed swallow, explains how to travel without money or a passport, and describes a terrifying incident involving three Spanish soldiers and a tiny orange dog. By trains, motorbikes, canoes, one camel and three ships, Clare follows the swallows from reed beds in South Africa, where millions roost in February, to a barn in Wales, where a pair nest in May.
The Woman at the Window by Emyr Humphreys
The Woman at the Window by Emyr Humphreys
Gentle but haunting, this selection of short stories takes a closer look at the importance of parental and filial love down the generations. The protagonists reminisce over the pattern of their lives, looking back as well as forward, for the chance to rekindle lost loves and find a home for themselves. Throughout these eclectic tales, three comfortably retired men find their sedate dinner transformed into a conflict with a knife-wielding escaped prisoner in a pre-Celtic tomb, a trip to the site of their first meeting brings a married couple face to face with a corpse, and illusions are shattered when a retired teacher reunites with his first love. Examining the threads of survivors’ lives from childhood to old age, this anthology utilizes the backdrop of a shifting postwar Europe and Wales. Weighing the best part of a century of European history, this is a complex study of mature reflection, loss, and survival.
Self-Portrait as Ruth by Jasmine Donahaye
Self-Portrait as Ruth by Jasmine Donahaye
“Self-Portrait as Ruth” is a provocative collection exploring the subject of Israel-Palestine in sharp, accessible poems that eschew the conventional language or orientation of either Zionist or Palestinian solidarity. Rooted in a Jewish family history that reaches into nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, “Self-Portrait as Ruth” is written in defiance of all ‘official’ versions of Israeli or Palestinian history. Polemical in places, the densely, painfully political subject matter is humanised throughout by a weaving together of individual and community, family and tribe, lover and self, nation and landscape. These poems are interrogations of the first person possessive – of claims, both singular and plural, to land, to identity, to history, and to the body – and of wounds and victimisation, both unique and collective. The subject matter is relentlessly topical and contested, whether focusing on the Palestinian story of catastrophe explored here in the lyrical love-poem Palestina, or on questions of Jewish guilt, investigated to forensic extent in poems such as “My Father’s Circumcision”, with its ‘innocent’ circumciser who, ‘with his ragged nail/tears the foreskin’ and ‘bends his head to suck the wound’, and in the short poem “Fetishes”, which juxtaposes anal sex and masturbation with perhaps the world’s most contentious place: the Western Wall in East Jerusalem. The concluding question, ‘how can you be sure the bloodprice that you paid will be enough?’ takes the moral interrogation of this collection beyond the topical matter of Israel-Palestine to universal issues of guilt and accountability. A challenging, aching, honest exploration of culpability, this lament will incite controversy and debate, making uncomfortable reading for partisans and non-partisans alike.
I Spy Pinhold Eye by Philip Gross
I Spy Pinhold Eye by Philip Gross
Fresh, creative, intellectually challenging and innovative—one of the finest collaborations between poet and photographer.
Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair by Richard Marggraf Turley
Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair by Richard Marggraf Turley
“Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair” explores the ‘furious stillness’ of love and art. From Chinese legends to scenes from artists’ studios, these poems open apertures on twilit worlds, where the ‘elastic collision of lovers’ burns, ears clang to the ‘torture of air’, and ‘winged creatures quiver on springs’. Here, the voices of old masters and artists’ wives, of holy men ‘huddled round three-legged dings’ and steam engineers dissolve into a curious chorus. In this collection, language seeks to break the ‘well of gravity’ as it ‘tidies the dark.’
The Meaning of Pictures by Peter Lord
The Meaning of Pictures by Peter Lord
Why do Welsh pictures painted between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries still matter today? This volume is mainly concerned with how pictures are understood by the people who use them—including patrons, museum curators, and the general public—rather than by the painters who paint them. The Meaning of Pictures discusses different aspects of painting unified by this common theme, including such topics as eighteenth-century painting, nineteenth-century genres, how pictures are valued by the art market, and how, since the 1980s, the Welsh art world has fought a reactionary battle against the New Art History movement.
The FIFA World Cup, occasionally called the Football World Cup, but usually referred to simply as the World Cup, is an international football competition contested by the men’s national teams of the members of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport’s global governing body. The championship has been awarded every four years since the first tournament in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946 when it was not contested because of World War II.
The current format of the tournament involves 32 teams competing for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about a month – this phase is often called the World Cup Finals. A qualification phase, which currently takes place over the preceding three years, is used to determine which teams qualify for the tournament together with the host nation(s).
During the 18 tournaments that have been held, seven nations have won the title. Brazil have won the World Cup a record five times, and they are the only team to have played in every tournament. Italy, the current champions, have won four titles, and Germany are next with three titles. The other former champions are Uruguay, winners of the inaugural tournament, and Argentina, with two titles each, and England and France, with one title each.
The World Cup is the most widely-viewed sporting event in the world, where an estimated 715.1 million people watched the final match of the 2006 World Cup held in Germany. The next World Cup will be held in South Africa, between 11 June and 11 July 2010, and the 2014 World Cup will be held in Brazil.
2010 FIFA World Cup
Fifa World Cup 2010
The 2010 FIFA World Cup will be the 19th FIFA World Cup, the premier international football tournament. It is scheduled to take place between 11 June and 11 July 2010 in South Africa. The 2010 FIFA World Cup will be the culmination of a qualification process that began in August 2007 and involved 204 of the 208 FIFA national teams. As such, it matches the 2008 Summer Olympics as the sports event with the most competing nations.
This will be the first time that the tournament has been hosted by an African nation, after South Africa beat Morocco and Egypt in an all-African bidding process. This decision left the Oceania Football Confederation as the only confederation yet to host the FIFA World Cup. Italy are the defending champions. The draw for the finals took place on 4 December 2009 in Cape Town.
Click here for FIFA World Cup 2010 books promotion. Hurry, while stocks and promotion last!
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’. The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879 – 1954), who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (published in 1901) and for bequeathing her estate to fund this award. As of 2008, the award is worth AU$42,000.
Miles Franklin
Miles Franklin
Miles Franklin (born “Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin”; 14 October 1879 – 19 September 1954) was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her autobiographical novel, My Brilliant Career, published in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936.
She was committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature, and she actively pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers’ organisations. She has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of a major literary award known as the Miles Franklin Award.
The 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist
On Wednesday 21 April, Trust announced the six authors and their novels selected for the 2010 shortlist.
The 2010 shortlist features some of Australia’s most established literary names alongside new and emerging authors, each showcasing Australian character and creativity.
The judging panel are excited by the diverse range of novels and what this means for Australian literature.
In deciding on a shortlist of six, longer than usual, the judges have acknowledged the quality of the works offered this year, and also their extreme diversity. The six novels chosen cover an extraordinary range. Their sheer quality, what Miles Franklin would have termed their ‘literary merit’, makes pigeonholing them impossible. Notions of genre could not contain them. Ideas about specific audience – is this young adult or adult fiction? – proved irrelevant. And in their exposition of Australian life ‘in any of its phases’, the six shortlisted writers gave the judges an exhilarating sense of just how bewilderingly varied those phases of Australian life could be. It has been a fascinating and challenging year.
The Miles Franklin Literary Award 2010 Presentation dinner will be held on 22 June 2010.
Lovesong by Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin)
Lovesong by Alex Miller
Seeking shelter in a Parisian cafe from a sudden rainstorm, John Patterner meets the exotic Sabiha and his carefully mapped life changes forever. Resonant of the bestselling Conditions of Faith, Alex Miller’s keenly awaited new novel tells the deeply moving story of their lives together, and of how each came undone by desire.
Strangers did not, as a rule, find their way to Chez Dom, a small, rundown Tunisian cafe on Paris’ distant fringes. Run by the widow Houria and her young niece, Sabiha, the cafe offers a home away from home for the North African immigrant workers working at the great abattoirs of Vaugiraud, who, like them, had grown used to the smell of blood in the air. But when one day a lost Australian tourist, John Patterner, seeks shelter in the cafe from a sudden Parisian rainstorm, a tragic love story begins to unfold.
Years later, while living a quiet life in suburban Melbourne, John is haunted by what happened to him and Sabiha at Vaugiraud. He confides his story to Ken, an ageing writer, who sees in John’s account the possibility for one last simple love story. When Ken tells his daughter this she reminds him ‘Love is never simple, Dad. You should know that.’ He does know it. But being the writer he is, he cannot resist the lure of the story.
Told with all Miller’s distinctive clarity, intelligence and compassion, Lovesong is a pitch-perfect novel, a tender and enthralling story about the intimate lives of ordinary people. Like the truly great novelist he is, Miller locates the heart of his story in the moral frailties and secret passions of his all-too-human characters.
The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro (Giramondo Publishing)
The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro
The Bath Fugues is a meditation on art and melancholy, in the form of three interwoven novellas, centred respectively on an aging art forger; a Portuguese poet, opium addict and art collector; and a doctor, who has built an art gallery in tropical Queensland. Each deals with issues of sincerity and deception, counterfeiting and rewriting, transmission and identity, as the characters try to make sense of their intertwined lives and anxieties, and the fragile friendships thrust upon them. Only the act of bathing will reconcile them to truth and revelation.
Jason Redvers, a drifter, fugitive and art forger, is slowly and painfully dying. Convinced that his memories and history have been wrongfully appropriated by Walter Gottlieb, his one-time mentor and patron, Redvers is driven to write a memoir, exposing and excising all kinds of scandals and secrets about his friends and colleagues. The second novella shifts focus to a Portuguese judge and poet, living in Macau in the 1920s, in a selfimposed exile of mistresses, opium pipes and Chinese art. Struggling with his desire to create, and procreate, Camilo Conceição descends slowly into madness, forgery and squalour. The third section returns to Australia, and takes up the story of a doctor, Judith Sarraute. Professionally privileged to the most intimate thoughts, secrets and desires of her clients, and to a cabinet of exotic venoms, Sarraute is troubled by the theft of her diaries, and the shadowy figure of a grifter, drifting at the edges of her carefully maintained world.
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (Allen & Unwin)
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
Late on a hot summer night in the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant fi gure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress.
Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it’s here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper’s horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as he locks horns with his tempestuous mother; falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu.
And in vainly attempting to restore the parts that have been shaken loose, Charlie learns to discern the truth from the myth, and why white lies creep like a curse. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.
The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster (Random House)
The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster
Emmett Brown is as dark as Heathcliff, and as moody. A waylaid romantic with one hand on Hemingway and the other around a bottle. Sometimes he’s an inspiration, but not often. His one obsession is working out ‘the System’, a way to bend mathematical probability to his will and his fortune. But when the lottery numbers and horses fail him, he spirals further into self-loathing and becomes a terror to his wife and children.
For the innocents – Louisa, Rob, Peter, Daniel and Jessie – the bonds formed hiding in hedges at the end of the street waiting for maelstroms to pass, are complex, strong and impossible to break. As they grow older, each must resolve the consequences of Emmett’s rage on their spirit and psyche, and attempt to escape his long shadow.
As Emmett lay dying, they come to discover that love – however imperfect – is the best protection against pain.
Truth by Peter Temple (Text Publishing)
Truth by Peter Temple
At the close of a long day, Inspector Stephen Villani stands in the bathroom of a luxury apartment high above the city of Melbourne. In the glass bath, a young woman lies dead, a panic button within reach.
Villani’s life is his work. It is his identity, his calling, his touchstone. But now, over a few sweltering summer days, as fires burn across the state and his superior and colleagues scheme and jostle, he finds all the certainties of his life are crumbling.
Truth is a novel about a man, a family, a city. It is about violence, murder, love, corruption, honour and deceit.
And it is about truth.
Truth is a companion piece of sorts, to Temple’s The Broken Shore. The protagonist here is Detective Inspector Stephen Villani, friend and former colleague of The Broken Shore’s hero Joe Cashin.
Set predominantly in Melbourne, the ongoing theme is that there is something rotten in the state of Victoria, and in Villani’s life. It begins with Villani driving between two shocking cases, and ends in devastating bushfire. In between things get complex, with political and police corruption, family disintegration on many levels, linked murders, work hierarchy, political changeover and personal issues for Villani to deal with.
Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett (Penguin Group Australia)
Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett
On the verge of her fourteenth birthday, Plum knows her life will change. But she has no idea how.
Over the coming weeks, her beautiful neighbour Maureen will show her how she might fly. Her adored older brothers will court catastrophe in worlds that she barely knows exist. And her friends – her worst enemies – will tease and test, smelling weakness. They will try to lead her on and take her down.
Who ever forgets what happens when you’re fourteen?
In Strategy Power Plays, Karen McCreadie and Tim Phillips combine some of the greatest political and military stategic concepts from their interpretations of these two classics: Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Here, in one handy volume McCreadie and Phillips interpret the key ideas in these classics for the modern world of business and life.
Tim Phillips has been a freelance journalist since 1990, writing about business, technology, social change and innovation. He has written for the Wall Street Journal Europe, the International Herald Tribune, The Times and the Sunday Times, The Observer, the Independent and the Daily Express among others. For two years he was a technology and internet columnist for the Guardian.
Karen McCreadie is a freelance writer who specialises in ghost-writing books. She formerly worked in marketing and the personal development industry, and recently returned to the UK after 10 years in Australia. Karen has written books for multi-millionaire businessmen, CEOs and international speakers on topics ranging from sales, coaching and wealth creation to the mind/body connection and psychological profiling.
Raised on a steady diet of fantasy novels, comic books, and Dungeons & Dragons, Peter V. Brett has been writing fantasy stories for as long as he can remember. He received a bachelor of arts degree in English literature and art history from the University at Buffalo in 1995, then worked for a decade in pharmaceutical publishing before returning to his bliss. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Danielle, their daughter, and two cats, Jinx and Max Powers. This is his first novel.
The Warded Man
The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett
In his debut novel, Brett catapults readers into a world in which demons rise at night and the human population lives in fear and seclusion. Only those who brave the unsheltered night and survive see what lies beyond their birth town or city. The setting itself is spare and underdeveloped with the focus instead being on the flawed heroes of the tale. Brett spends a majority of the novel-the first of a series-establishing the backstories of the main characters, three humans who come from different towns and backgrounds and are thrown into the battle at a young age. Readers are held in suspense until the three finally meet. Brett uses the demons and magic to examine issues prevalent in our own society, such as religion versus science. The book is captivating and well written, quickly drawing readers in. The Warded Man is a must-read for anyone looking for a new fantasy world to explore.
The Painted Man
The Painted Man by Peter V. Brett
The stunning debut fantasy novel from author Peter V. Brett. The Painted Man, book one of the Demon trilogy, is a captivating and thrilling fantasy adventure, pulling the reader into a world of demons, darkness and heroes. Sometimes there is very good reason to be afraid of the dark! Arlen lives with his parents on their small farmstead, half a day’s ride from the isolated hamlet of Tibbet’s Brook. As dusk falls each evening, a mist rises from the ground promising death to any foolish enough to brave the coming darkness. For hungry demons materialize from the vapours to feed, and as the shadows lengthen, all of humanity is forced to take shelter behind magical wards and pray that their protection holds until the dawn. But when Arlen’s world is shattered by the demon plague, he realizes that it is fear, rather than the monsters, which truly cripples humanity. Only by conquering their own terror can they ever hope to defeat the demons. Now Arlen must risk leaving the safety of his wards to discover a different path, and offer humanity a last, fleeting chance of survival.
Robert Harris is the author of Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland. He has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for the London Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. His novels have sold more than ten million copies and been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Berkshire, England, with his wife and four children.
The Ghost Writer
The Ghost Writer by Robert Harris
Don’t miss the major motion picture staring Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan. The Ghost Writer is an eerily timely thriller of power, politics, corruption, and murder from bestselling author Robert Harris.
“The moment I heard how McAra died, I should have walked away. I can see that now. . . .”
The role of a ghostwriter is to make his client look good, not to uncover the truth. But what happens when the client is a major political figure, and the truth could change the course of history? Adam Lang, the controversial former prime minister of Britain, is writing his memoirs. But his first ghostwriter dies under shocking circumstances, and his replacement—whose experience lies in portraying aging rock stars and film idols—knows little about Lang’s inner circle. Flown to join Lang in a secure house on the remote shores of Martha’s Vineyard in the depths of winter, cut off from everyone and everything he knows, he comes to realize he should never have taken the job.
It’s not just his predecessor’s mysterious death that haunts him, but Adam Lang himself. Deep in Lang’s past are buried shocking secrets . . . secrets with the power to alter world politics . . . secrets with the power to kill.
Lustrum
Lustrum by Robert Harris
Lustrum is a stunning trilogy about the Roman Empire by Robert Harris, author of the acclaimed bestsellers Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium and The Ghost.
63 BC, the year when Cicero is consul. Most of his time in office is devoted to uncovering and thwarting a violent conspiracy to overthrow the state, ostensibly led by Crassus and a group of disaffected senators. Underlying this is the great rivalry between Cicero and Caesar, who represent two different types of ambition: one orthodox, the other revolutionary. As Caesar’s power grows Cicero must face the inevitable compromises that come from holding power – is it justifiable to use illegal methods in order to save the Republic?
Robert Harris yet again proves himself a master of historical fiction as he takes the reader to the heart of republican Rome with a novel that is at once brilliantly researched and utterly gripping.
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