Before Pat Summerall became a legend among football announcers, he was a giant among football players. A two-way player on the 1958 New York Giants, he held the unique distinction of being the only athlete in football history to be coached the same season by the ultimate brand names in...

I was at mile 17 of the Boston Marathon when a runner looked up from her cellphone and said, in disbelief, a bomb went off at the finish line.

I was running with a small group of people through the Newton hills at the time, the last...

Barnes & Noble is fighting the good fight, as did George Custer, the Light Brigade, and the 1962 New York Mets before them. And like all of those famous losers, B&N is still going down big time.

The bookstore chain has just announced a new publishing platform for the...

Publishers love to publish books on branding, because it's such a hot topic in the business world today. The question you have to ask is why publishers don't bother reading the books they publish.

Every industry in the known universe rises and falls on the strength...

What do the Chinese want that we Americans take for granted?

And why is China far more interested in Bill Rehnquist than Bill Gates?

The evidence is in from Amazon China: Herman "Obe" Obermayer's biography of the late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist has been a bestseller in...

It's not your genetics or even your IQ that determines your future, says Charles Murray.

It's your zip code.

In his outrageous and highly entertaining book, just released in paperback, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 (Crown Forum), Murray argues that only the wealthy live the virtues and...

No, silly. Of course not. Well, probably not. But the main thing is... I made you look.

That's the message of the most entertainingly disturbing and disturbingly entertaining book on the media published in decades, Ryan Holiday's Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Holiday...

Once upon a time, authors wrote big books about big topics, and the publication of big books were big events. The competition was Freudian: whoever had the longest one could brag the most. Today, however, the closing of the American mind (the title of a 400-page book a generation ago)...

Okay, not all books suck. Just most.

Why, you ask?

Many reasons. Where to begin?

How about this... books no longer are in tune with our ADD-shattered brains. In a much earlier era of human history, before the advent of the...

Maybe the Mayans had the American publishing industry in mind when their calendar conked out. If you thought 2012 was a bad year for traditional book publishing, and it was, you'll be nostalgic for it by the end of 2013. How bad will it be? Real bad. Here are my...

This is the most pain I've ever felt after a marathon, and I didn't even run.

I was due to run my third straight New York City Marathon last weekend as a guide runner for a disabled runner with Achilles International, an amazing nonprofit that matches able-bodied marathoners...

It seems so... unliterary. But publishing houses despise authors and are doing everything they can to make their lives miserable. Here's why.

Authors are admittedly a strange lot. There's something antisocial about retreating from life for months or years at a time, to perform the solitary act of writing a...

Two of America's greatest living novelists, Tom Wolfe and John Grisham, have each come out with novels just in time for the holiday season. Both novels are second-rate. The reasons why reveal much about society and the future of fiction writing.

Wolfe has written Back to Blood, a typically massive...

When I saw the word "synergies" applied to the proposed merger of publishing giants Penguin and Random House, I laughed out loud. "Synergies" is Wall Street-speak for "Let's merge two failing companies, fire half the employees, run the resulting business more cheaply, suck out all the money we can as...

John C. Bogle is mad as hell and won't take it anymore, or at least as mad as hell as a dignified, Bible- and Churchill-quoting octogenarian can be. Born just months before the stock market crash of 1929, and the godfather of the mutual fund industry, Bogle is deeply unhappy...

The most important book ever written about Israel's place in the Middle East is also the saddest and, in many ways, the cruelest and most unfair. The book is Fortress Israel, The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country -- and Why They Can't Make Peace, by...

It used to be that a standard feature of the home of the upwardly intellectually mobile was a shelf of books -- a display of erudition to all visitors, a signal that this was a family that prized knowledge and ideas.

Alas, books and the bookshelves groaning under their...

The Internet affords children endless opportunities to get into serious trouble, downloading what they shouldn't download, looking at what they shouldn't be looking at, and getting ideas about what they shouldn't be getting ideas about.

But the good news is that if your kids are like mine, they may be...

Where have all the great sports books gone?

There's a strange phenomenon in sports books these days. They can't just describe an athlete's career. Instead, they have to put him on the couch and figure out how his childhood issues affect his ability to play.

Or they can't just tell...

Penguin, one of the world's top publishers, announced recently that its net profits are down a whopping 48 percent over the first six months of the year.

Stop the presses!

That's huge! Forty-eight percent? Imagine if that happened in your business. Don't you think...