The Funny Business of Comic-Con

It has become the largest convention in America and the shot heard round the world where pop culture is concerned. For geeks, comics fans, sci-fi buffs and pop culture media, San Diego’s Comic-Con International is heaven, nirvana and The Avengers movie combined.

Read reviews of more top graphic books.

But how did an event first organized in 1970 for less than 200 people become a worldwide behemoth that draws more than 125,000 guests? More importantly, what lessons can be drawn from this nontraditional topic and translated for business people facing similar challenges in other markets? To solve this ...

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'Face-to-Face': Why Word of Mouth Still Beats Social Media

Social media is not king, according to the head honchos of the Keller Fay Group, the groundbreaking marketing and research consultancy devoted not to the Twitterverse but to good old-fashioned word of mouth. In their new book, CEO Ed Keller (The Influentials, 2003) and COO Brad Fay delve deep into the fallacies behind the “Social Media Gold Rush,” and give great thought to the media strategies that really work best for business and not just buzz.

Here, Keller answered a few of our questions about The Face-to-Face Book, which he co-authored with Fay.

Brush up on business practices with billionaire ...

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A New Look at Urban Life in 'City'

We built this city, sang those celebrated prophets Starship. But in point of fact civilization rests on a rich and long-buried history of human beings communing, fighting, loving and surviving the great metropolises of our little blue world. 

Now British researcher P.D. Smith turns his piercing attention to the history and development of cities in City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, touching on topics ranging from gladiatorial combat to the murky world of underground labyrinths.

Read more new and notable nonfiction this June.

Most people write about specific places. Why write about the concept of cities themselves?

There ...

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‘Being Unreasonable’ with Eli Broad

Eli Broad is a lot of things to a lot of people—capitalist, philanthropist, art collector and innovator, among them. But the billionaire is anything but conventional in his approach to life, money, art and time. 

Broad’s head for business has yielded two Fortune 500 companies, a considerable boost in the cultural infrastructure of Los Angeles, the founding of the Broad Foundations and a pledge by the author and his wife Edye to give three-quarters of their amassed fortune to philanthropy.

Read more new and notable nonfiction. 

In his first book, Broad shares the unusual principles that have led ...

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Love Notes and Other Dispatches From Paris

Before Rosecrans Baldwin became a novelist, he got what he thought was the opportunity of a lifetime—the self-proclaimed Francophile got a gig working as an ad man on the Champs D’elysee.

With half-baked French and dreams of the City of Light, Baldwin arrived in Paris to discover that life as an expat is not always what it seems, remembering the experience in Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down. Here, the author of the acclaimed 2010 novel You Lost Me There recounts the development, surprises and lessons learned writing the unusual and very funny memoir ...

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Behind 'The Art of the Sale'

When a book about sales and salespeople starts with one of the hard-boiled lines from David Mamet’s famous play Glengarry Glen Ross, you know you’re in for something a little different.

In his last book, Ahead of the Curve, Philip Delves Broughton eviscerated the MBA program at Harvard University. In The Art of the Sale he posits that sales is at the root of everything we do as people, offering a clear-eyed look at how to succeed in business—while really, really trying.

Read more new and notable nonfiction this April.

What makes The Art of the Sale ...

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London Calling

London is a city of voices, captured by the great and small, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith. But where are the common people, the outlaws, the refugees, the police and the protestors in the story of the world’s greatest metropolis?

Read more new and notable nonfiction.

Canadian playwright Craig Taylor has made sure to include those voices in his oral traditional portrait of the city in the 21^st century in Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now—As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long ...

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Charlie Newton's Chicago in 'Start Shooting'

In a novel that we called “an even more thrilling, densely packed novel that makes most Chicago crime thrillers seem tame,” Charlie Newton returns to the mean streets with Start Shooting.

Read more new and notable thrillers.

This densely plotted police procedural pits two local cops against a conspiracy of violence and corruption that dates back to World War II, with a soulful spoonful of Chicago blues to boot. Just returned from Austin, Texas, where Kirkus Reviews and the Texas Book Festival presented Charlie’s talk about his new novel, the novelist sat down to talk about cops, criminals and ...

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Keeping it Local with 'Our Black Year'

In a social and economic experiment as bold as it was challenging, Maggie and John Anderson pledged to spend a year buying only from black-owned businesses in their hometown of Chicago. In Our Black Year, Maggie and co-author Ted Gregory chronicle the results of the couple’s experience, balancing the harsh realities of the business world with an inspiring story of a couple’s real investment in their community.

Read more books in honor of Black History Month.

We talked to Maggie Anderson about her year, but readers can visit EEforTomorrow.com for more information on this modest, game-changing proposal ...

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Tales of the Unwritten Mumbai

Nearly five years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Katherine Boo discovered Annawadi, a twilight settlement buried in the heart of metropolitan Mumbai. There she found a rich universe, plagued by poverty, whose residents resolutely cling to their fragile aspirations.

Browse more of 2012's best books on current affairs & social sciences.

In her debut, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Boo delivers unto readers their story with a crisp, graceful prose that elegantly captures the hidden lives of her subjects. In a starred review, we called it "the best book yet written on India in the throes of a brutal transition."

What first ...

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Stop Doing That, and Other Thoughts on Modern-Day Manners

Miss Manners has nothing on Henry Alford, the acerbic New York essayist whose new guide to manners, Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?, was recently excerpted in Vanity Fair.

However, she is one of the many figures quizzed by Alford about the tricky business of post-modern civility, as well as Tim Gunn and New York City tourists. In a tome we dubbed “an idiosyncratic excursion into the land of civility,” Alford acidly waxes poetic about personal space, workplace etiquette, the tricky virtual landscape of social media, and other pitfalls between wickedness and discretion.  

Read more new and notable ...

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Money and 'The Behavior Gap'

In his first book, The Behavior Gap, financial planner and columnist Carl Richards uses common-sense advice, deceptively simple cocktail napkin sketches and clear-eyed insight to explain why we behave the way we do around money.

Here he talks to us about the divide between investor expectations and investor return, and how we can start to have consequential conversations about money.

Read more new and notable nonfiction titles for December.

The Behavior Gap rises above an ocean of competing financial advice. What makes your book unique?

It's meant to provide the framework for more meaningful conversations about money. It's ...

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‘Life Itself’ with Roger Ebert

For more than 20 years, film critic and historian Roger Ebert was an omnipresent presence on television, as much a part of the fabric of American life as Johnny Carson’s famous golf swing. With his lanky adversary and sometimes partner-in-crime Gene Siskel, Ebert guided moviegoers through the great highs and dismal lows of the world’s cinema, giving a big “Thumbs Up” to the movies he championed. Meanwhile, he used his famous pen at the Chicago Sun-Times, where one scathing 1994 review read, “Hated hated hated hated hated this movie.” (Rob Reiner’s North, in case you were wondering ...

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George Pelecanos’ new series ‘The Cut’

There are hard-hitting writers, like Dennis Lehane and Richard Price, and there are ambitious, prolific and timeless writers like Robert B. Parker and Lawrence Block. The best of those two worlds merge in American classic George Pelecanos, who has cauterized the wounds of this country in 16 books about cops, crime, race and home-grown wars. He’s equally well known for his intensive work-for-hire on the HBO series The Wire, The Pacific and most recently Treme. Readers will be overjoyed to delve into his new series, starting with The Cut, about a mercenary P.I. in Pelecanos’ home turf of ...

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Aaron Friedberg on the Power Struggle in Asia

As something of a real-life Jack Ryan, professor Aaron Friedberg plies his intellectual trade teaching politics and international affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, following a term as deputy-assistant for National Security Affairs in the George W. Bush administration. The research behind A Contest for Supremacy grew out of his abiding interest in the rise of Asia and its implications for America.

Friedberg recently spoke to us about current events in Asia, and the struggle for influence there between China and the United States.

Read more books about China at Kirkus.

How did you come to want to ...

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Christopher Moore: ‘The Griff’

It’s a surprise that we haven’t seen the manic comic energy of Christopher Moore in the funny pages before. After writing a dozen novels about bloodsucking teens, angels, monsters and the Messiah, the beloved author has launched a new experiment with The Griff.

This kinetic, cinematic mash-up about an alien invasion started life as a screenplay, co-written with filmmaker Ian Corson. Now the script has been warmly adapted as a graphic novel by the writing duo and innovative Singapore-based artist Jennyson Rosero. Even better, Moore himself will be on hand to promote The Griff at Comic-Con in San ...

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Spandex, Capes and Big-Budget Flicks: The Standout Comic Collections of 2011

For older comic book fans, it’s like a world gone mad. In the 1970s, we crowded around TV sets, waiting for a glimpse of “Spidey Super Stories” on PBS’ The Electric Company. We watched reruns of Adam West’s cartoonish Batman, superstiff Super Friends, and a Disco-era Shazam, before finally believing a man could fly when Christopher Reeve finally donned the big red cape.

Read more about a few of this year's best graphic novels at Kirkus.

This summer alone, we have gods of thunder, a bulletproof Black Beauty, a cosmos-spanning cop with a ring, an ultimate ...

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12 Can’t-Miss Graphic Novels of 2011 (And One Novel...)

These are strange days for the graphic novel. Grant Morrison makes this observation in Supergods, his new meditation on the state of the comic book: “Comics were no longer some last-chance hotel for fantasy-prone mavericks who found other entertainment outlets too tame or too restrictive for their visions. They were now a respectable stepping-stone to Hollywood and big money. Cleaned up, hair cut, prepped for a settled life in the suburbs. No more noise, no more corrupting the kids or making them think about stuff they shouldn’t. At least for now.” 

It's Comic-Con San Diego week. Celebrate all ...

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The Truth about Sharks in ‘Demon Fish’

Sharks, as we all know from Jaws and the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, can be scary, dangerous creatures. But how well do we really know these denizens of the deep? Now prolific Washington Post staff writer Juliet Eilperin, who has covered the environmental beat for the national desk since 2004, takes us into the ocean to learn more about these awesome creatures. In her exuberant worldwide investigation, Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks, she reveals stories ranging from ancient rites to summon sharks by magic, to the brutal economics of the shark fin trade.

Read more ...

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'Robopocalypse' is coming

While earning his doctorate in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, Daniel H. Wilson found time to write such scintillating survival manuals as How to Survive a Robot Uprising (2005) and How to Build a Robot Army (2007). He recently rocked the Hollywood buzz-o-meter when Steven Spielberg optioned his debut novel, Robopocalypse. Pretty good for a guy who hadn’t even finished the book yet.

Read more reviews of new and notable fiction for June.  

Robopocalypse is a scary damn book. How did you dream up this nightmarish scenario?

The better the technology gets, the more we depend on it. The more ...

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