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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: President Kennedy, Most Recent at Top [Help]
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1. How well do you know your world leaders? [quiz]

In today’s globalised and instantly shareable social-media world, heads of state have to watch what they say, just as much – and perhaps even more so – than what they actually do. The rise of ‘Twiplomacy’ and the recent war of sound bites between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton speak to this ever-increasing trend. With these witty refrains in mind, test your knowledge of world leaders and their retorts – do you know who said what?

The post How well do you know your world leaders? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

0 Comments on How well do you know your world leaders? [quiz] as of 10/9/2016 8:03:00 AM
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2. The importance of keeping the traditonal book in paperback and hardback forms

Rubbishing those who hail the digital age as the end for books, book publishers industry players and best-selling authors on Saturday hailed a new dawn for publishing, with India’s voracious readers at its forefront.

Book sales have been squeezed in recent years by e-books and the huge success of Amazon.Com’s Kindle reader, but India’s booming book publishers market is proof of the physical book’s staying power, said participants at Asia’s largest literary event, the DSC Jaipur Literary Festival.

“You read something on Twitter and you know it is ephemeral,” said Patrick French, a best-selling historian and biographer who has written extensively on Asia. “Yet the book is a solid thing. The book endures.”

Regional language novelists and poets rubbed shoulders with Nobel laureates and Booker Prize winners at the seventh festival to be held in the historical pink-tinged city of Jaipur, the capital of India’s northwestern Rajasthan state.

Hundreds of book lovers attended a debate on the fate of printed books in the sun-drenched grounds of a former palace as part of the free five-day event.

“The idea of the book dying comes up all the time. It’s wrong. I think this is a wonderful time for books, to enlarge the audience of the book and draw in more readers,” said John Makinson, Chairman and CEO of the Penguin Group of publishers.

“Books matter more in India than anywhere else we publish them,” added Makinson, whose Penguin Group is one of the world’s largest English-language book publishers.

While book sales slip in most western countries, the non-academic book market in India is currently growing at a rate of 15 to 18 percent annually, as rapid economic growth swells literacy rates and adds millions to the middle class every year.

At the festival, schoolchildren from around the country chased their authorly heroes through the lunch queues to get autographs on newly-purchased books.

Makinson noted that the pressure on physical bookshops in countries like the United States — where bookseller Borders Group Inc is in talks to secure a $500 million credit line — doesn’t exist in India, adding that books have a key role to play in Indian society.

“In India books define and create the social conversation amongst christian book publishers and children’s book publishers. In China, the books that sell well are self-improvement titles. Popular books in India are of explanations, explaining the world. The inquisitive nature of India is unique.”

Indian critic Sunil Sethi, who presents India’s most popular television program on books, said the digital age presented an opportunity, rather than a threat, for printed matter. “Even before I finish my show, the authors are on Twitter to say they are on TV talking about their book. Technology is merging things, but the book is still at the center,” Sethi said.

French agreed that technology, if well-managed, could actually help win books new friends and wider sales.

“Digital e-books have created a space for discussion. Books now have websites and forums, and so reading books on electronic devices has created communities and interaction,” he said.

Nearly 50,000 writers, critics, publishers and fans are expected to attend the festival.

3. What’s going on with Borders?

For the book publishers and authors perspective, Borders was once a worthy rival to Barnes & Noble. Perhaps even bigger than B&N. The two brick-and-mortar chain bookstores were able to offer better prices than independent bookstores and drove many out of business. But that was before the success of Amazon and other online retailers brought the phrase “brick and mortar” into regular use — and once that happened, everything changed; indeed many UK book publishers watched in horror last year the UK divison of Borders hit the wall.

Barnes & Noble, if buffeted by Amazon’s success, has remained afloat; Borders has been taking on water.

On Dec. 30 Borders announced it would not make payments owed to some publishers, without specifying whom. Hachette confirmed that it was among those who would not be paid by Borders.

Borders has nearly 200 Waldenbooks and Borders Express outlets slated for closure before the month of January is out. Additional Borders stores are also set to close, including Westwood’s.

Borders is also cutting back on staff. On Wednesday, Borders announced that it would close a distribution center in Tennessee, eliminating more than 300 jobs; 15 management positions were eliminated Friday. And the resignation of two top executives — the chief information officer and general counsel — was announced at the beginning of 2011.

Meanwhile, Borders is seeking to restructure its debt like the frantic chess of a brutal endgame. On Thursday, Borders met with publishers and proposed that the payments owed by the bookseller be reclassified as a loan, as part of that refinancing. “But on Friday, publishers remained skeptical of the proposal put forth by Borders,” the New York Times reports. “One publisher said that the proposal was not enough to convince the group that Borders had found a way to revive its business, and that they were less optimistic than ever that publishers could return to doing business with Borders.”

Nevertheless, Borders — which lost money in the first three quarters of 2010 — remains the second-largest bookstore chain by revenue. Its loss would have a significant effect on book publishers across the United States.

Investors, however, seem cheered by the recent news swirling around Borders. Shares rose 12% on Thursday after reports that the bookseller was close to securing financing.

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4. The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud: Canadian book publishers join forces to rush a new edition of Giller Prize-winning novel

A quickly assembled home team in the Canadian book publishers industry has claimed victory over the so-called “Toronto multinational book factories” with a deal to bring out another 40,000 copies of The Sentimentalists, Johanna Skibsrud’s largely unavailable, Giller Prize-winning novel.

Under the terms negotiated between tiny Gaspereau Press of Nova Scotia and Vancouver-based publisher Douglas & McIntyre, the Friesens Corp. of Altona, Man., has agreed to print a new paperback edition by this Friday. “Because of the urgency of the situation, we will pull out all the stops,” Friesens sales manager Doug Symington said.

The deal brings “three proudly independent Canadian entities” together to solve the crisis that emerged when Skibsrud’s unheralded debut novel won Canada’s most prestigious literary award, according to publisher Scott McIntyre. “With our sales, marketing and distribution system onside, an exceptional novel will quickly reach the wide audience it deserves,” he added.

The books should be available for sale early next week, according to McIntyre. Printed in paperback with a pumped-up cover image and the signature red sticker of a Giller Prize winner (as well as the Douglas & MacIntyre Book Publisher imprint on the spine), they will sell for $19.95 compared with the original edition’s $27.95 cover price.

Booksellers snapped up the entire new edition within hours of its being announced, according to McIntyre, and Friesens is reserving paper stock to print another 20,000.

Gaspereau Press made headlines across the country last week when it turned away Toronto publishers eager to bring out more copies of the award-winning book, which it had hand-printed in an edition of 800 copies and was reproducing at a rate of 1,000 copies a week even after it won the award. But even as the company attempted to justify the go-slow approach, calling the Giller win “an interesting opportunity to slow the world down a hair and let people realize that good books don’t go stale,” Gaspereau co-publisher Andrew Steeves was negotiating a new deal with Douglas & McIntyre.

“D&M had always been my back-pocket doomsday scenario,” Steeves said yesterday, adding, “I was as surprised as anyone when we actually won.” He added that the company will continue producing its deluxe edition with a wrapper printed on a hand-cranked letterpress.

Both publishers emphasized the advantage of the new deal to Skibsrud, who had remained quiet last week while her publisher vowed not to compromise its principles by selling large quantities of her novel to an eager public.

It was patience well rewarded, the author wrote yesterday in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail from Istanbul, where she is vacationing. Admitting that she “doesn’t have much knowledge or interest in the business end of things,” Skibsrud said she was “so glad that a solution has been arrived at that allows the books to be distributed widely without sacrificing any of Gaspereau Press’s practices and ideals, which make them so unique and special to work with.”

Even Friesens, a $70-million, can-do book manufacturer, is sympathetic with the Nova Scotians. “I get where they’re coming from and I can also somewhat understand the Toronto-versus-the-rest-of-the-world mentality that they’re showing,” Symington said, adding that Friesens and Gaspereau are a good philosophical fit.

“We’ve been around for 103 years, we’re employee-owned, we’re a privately held company, so all the staff out here has a high concern and a high regard for books,” he said. “We’re big, but we’re not so big, so to speak.”

The book is such a “cause célèbre it will just shoot out of the gate,” McIntyre predicted, saying that opinion on the matter

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5. Book Publishing News: President John F Kennedy’s speech writer whose inspiring rhetoric was matched by adroit political skills

Ted Sorensen, who died a week ago, was the strategist and political speech writer behind John F. Kennedy in his successful campaign for the American presidency in 1960 — a triumph that owed much to Sorensen’s book publisher talents as a phrasemaker, and one that set the standard for modern oratory.

Sorensen’s 14-minute inaugural address for Kennedy famously called for self-sacrifice and civic engagement — “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” — and promised to spare no cost in defending American interests worldwide.

Among Kennedy’s inner circle working in the West Wing of the White House, Sorensen (as special counsel) was the youngest, but he ranked just below the president’s brother Bobby. Such was the closeness of Sorensen’s collaboration with JFK on some of his most memorable speeches that no one was quite certain who wrote what.

The glamorous, wealthy politician from Massachusetts and his diffident aide from the Midwest made an odd but compatible pair. In 1960 Time magazine described Sorensen as “a sober, deadly earnest, self-effacing man with a blue steel brain.” But, as Sorensen himself noted, both he and Kennedy had a wry sense of humour, a dislike of hypocrisy, a love of books and a high-minded regard for public life.

In October 1962, Sorensen applied himself to the growing crisis in Cuba, as the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war over Soviet missiles sited there.

Kennedy ordered Sorensen and Bobby Kennedy, the administration’s attorney general, to draft a letter to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who had sent a series of conflicting messages, first conciliatory, then belligerent.

Their carefully worded response — which ignored Khrushchev’s harsher statements and offered a concession involving American weapons in Turkey — was critical in persuading the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba, averting war between the superpowers. Sorensen considered this his greatest achievement.

Although acclaimed as “the poet of Camelot” (as the Kennedy administration was known), Sorensen never claimed exclusive authorship of these rolling cadences, describing speechwriting within Kennedy’s White House as highly collaborative — with JFK a constant source of suggestions of his own.

Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was born into what he called a Danish-Russian-Jewish Unitarian family on May 8, 1928 in Lincoln, Nebraska, where his father was a progressive Republican state attorney general. After graduating from Lincoln High School in 1945, he studied law at the University of Nebraska.

In 1952, when he was 24, he joined Kennedy’s staff. The newly elected senator for Massachusetts reportedly gave Sorensen two short interviews a day or two apart before hiring him. The pair hit it off immediately.

In January 1960, Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination and, with Sorensen, went on to wage one of the most successful political campaigns in American history.

Sorensen thrived on pressure and, as Kennedy was delivering one speech, he would often be found writing the next. As “chief of staff for ideas,” Sorensen became one of the most prominent and influential figures in the political landscape during JFK’s brief presidency.

After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Sorensen worked as an international lawyer, and numbered the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat among his clients. He remained involved in book publishing, politics, joining Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968 and running unsuccessfully for the

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