Stephen Covey, author of ’7 Habbits of Highly Effective People’, dead at 79

Photo credit: AP | This Feb. 25, 2003 file photo shows Dr. Stephen R. Covey at a training session at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Covey, the motivational speaker best known for the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” died July 16, 2012, in Idaho, three months after a serious bicycle accident in Utah. He was 79.

Stephen R. Covey, author of the bestselling motivational book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” died on Monday at an Idaho hospital from injuries he suffered in a bicycle accident in April, family members said in a statement. He was 79.

Covey, a former professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, founded an executive training center in Salt Lake City that merged in 1997 with Franklin Quest Co to form FranklinCovey, a leading provider of time-management seminars and publications.

The publicly traded company is perhaps best known for its line of Franklin Planner appointment calendars, which it markets along with books, workshops and other products based on its “Franklin System” of business management and Covey’s “7 Habits” principles.

Covey, a Salt Lake City native, earned a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University and a doctorate from Brigham Young.

But it was his self-help guide to success in business, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change,” published in 1989, that made Covey a brand name.

He went on to write several more bestsellers about business management, including ”Principle-Centered Leadership,” became a favorite motivational speaker on the Fortune 100 circuit and served as a personal consultant to organizations ranging from Procter & Gamble to NASA.

Covey was recognized in 1996 as one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans, and was named among the world’s top 50 business thinkers in 2011 by Thinkers50, a group that compiles that list every other year.

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Madeline Miller’s Achilles novel wins Orange prize

Author Madeline Miller holds her statuette after winning the Orange Prize for Fiction Award for her novel The Song of Achilles at the Royal Festival Hall, London 30 May 2012.
Photograph by: Neil Hall , REUTERS

By Paul Casciato

U.S. author Madeline Miller won the Orange Prize for fiction on Wednesday for her debut novel The Song of Achilles, a Homeric tale of love and friendship.

Miller’s novel tells the story of Patroclus, an awkward young prince in exile whose friendship with ancient Greek hero Achilles grows into something far deeper. When word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Patroclus journeys with Achilles to Troy, little realising what awaits.

“This is a more than worthy winner – original, passionate, inventive and uplifting,” Orange Prize panel chair Joanna Trollope said in a statement. “Homer would be proud of her.”

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Hitler’s Mein Kampf returning to German bookstores

Hitler's Mein Kampf - Source: Wiki Commons

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, banned from German bookstores, will soon be available from newspaper kiosks after a British publisher said he would print excerpts from the text in Germany.

But the state of Bavaria, which owns the copyrights to the Nazi vision of Aryan racial supremacy, said it was considering legal steps to block publication.

Reprinting the Nazi dictator’s autobiography, which outlines his ambitions to seize vast areas of land in eastern Europe to provide living space for the so-called master race, is outlawed in Germany except for academic study.

The first of three 16-page extracts from the book, accompanied by a critical commentary, will be published later this month with a print run of 100,000 each, Peter McGee, head of London-based publishing firm Albertas Ltd told Reuters.

“It is a sensitive subject in Germany but the incredible thing is most Germans don’t have access to Mein Kampf because it has this taboo, this ‘black magic’ surrounding it,” he said.

“We want Mein Kampf to be accessible so people can see it for what it is, and then discard it. Once exposed, it can be consigned to the dustbin of literature,” he said.

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Effin woman launches online fight for Facebook recognition

Effin in Co Limerick has been branded 'offensive' by Facebook and blocked from the site. Photograph: Thierry Roge/Reuters

Facebook wipes small Irish village off the map because it deems name of Effin in Co Limerick obscene.

By Henry McDonald

Facebook may have its European headquarters in Dublin but the social networking site has wiped a small Irish village off the map because its name is deemed obscene.

Effin in County Limerick has been branded “offensive” by Facebook and is blocked from the site.

A native of the village has now started an online battle to get Effin recognised by the site.

Anne Marie Kennedy, who works at the University of Limerick, said yesterday that she, along with several more friends, have been trying to insert the village name into the “home” section of their Facebook profiles in recent months. But they have not been successful.

Kennedy also tried to set up a Facebook page entitled, “Please get my hometown Effin recognised”. But it too was blocked by the social networking site.

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Rare Tagore notebook to be sold at NY auction

Rabindranath Tagore

By Chris Michaud

A previously unknown manuscript by Bengali poet and Nobel Literature Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore is expected to fetch up to $250,000 when it is auctioned next month in New York.

Rabindranath’s 1928 notebook contains 12 poems and lyrics for 12 songs in Bengali, some of which were drafts for works that were published later, according to Sotheby’s.

Marsha Malinowski, the auction house’s senior manuscript specialist, described the notebook, which is covered in red cloth and will be auctioned on December 13, as “in gorgeous condition.”

“It has been preserved very well,” she said, adding that it had been kept in a safe deposit box since the 1950s.

Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in 1913 and became the first Asian Noble Laureate, kept the diaries when he traveled, according to Malinowski.

But in her 25 years at the auction house she said it was the first time she had come across anything connected to Tagore, who won global fame as a poet, novelist, playwright, composer and artist.

Tagore presented the 152-page notebook to a family friend who was also an early patron in the mid-1930s. Thirty four pages of the notebook contain writing.

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World Book Night comes to America

In an effort to stimulate interest in reading, British volunteers have handed out as many as one million free books on World Book Night. Luke MacGregor/Reuters

The British tradition of declaring a “World Book Night” during which thousands of volunteers give out free books on street corners will come to the US for the first time on April 23, 2012.

By Molly Driscoll

A British literary tradition (and no, it’s not Harry Potter) will be coming to the United States for the first time this April.

World Book Night, during which thousands of volunteers give copies of selected books to friends and family and hand them out on street corners, will happen in America for the first time on April 23, the same day the event will take place in Britain. Twenty-five books are selected by British publishers to be given out for the event.

Volunteers give out 48 books a piece – amounting to as many as one million books distributed – and the publicity involved can create a significant ripple effect on sales. Several of the books selected for World Book Night 2010 – including “Toast” by Nigel Slater and “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold” by John Le Carré – saw triple-digit increases in sales after the event.

World Book Night was founded by UNESCO to celebrate reading, and World Book Night will also be celebrated in Ireland in 2012.

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Tintin in the Congo not racist, says Belgian judicial adviser

Mbutu Bienvenu holds a placard that shows a scene from the book Tintin in the Congo. Photograph: Virginia Mayo/AP

Setback for legal bid to have Hergé’s 1931 adventure banned.

Reuters

A Belgian judicial adviser has recommended the country’s courts reject a legal bid to have a book featuring fictional boy hero Tintin banned for racism, court documents showed.

Valery de Theux de Meylandt, a Belgian Procureur du Roi whose opinion is requested and typically followed by the court, advised judges in a written statement to rule against campaigner Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo’s application to have Tintin in the Congo banned for racism.

De Theux de Meylandt said in the document seen by Reuters that Tintin author Georges Remi (better known as Hergé) did not intend to incite racial hatred when he depicted his cartoon hero on an adventure in the former Belgian colony in a 1931 work that was updated in 1946.

“The representations (of African people) by Herge are a reflection of his time,” De Theux de Meylandt wrote.

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Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize

From left, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates and Don Delillo (Credit: reuters/Thousandrobots)

An American hasn’t won in 20 years. The Academy finds our writers insular and self-involved — and they’re right.

By Alexander Nazaryan

America wants a Nobel Prize in literature. America demands it! America doesn’t understand why those superannuated Swedes haven’t given one to an American since Toni Morrison in 1993. America wonders what they’re waiting for with Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. America wonders how you say “clueless” in Swedish.

OK, enough. But the literature Nobel will be announced this Thursday and if an American doesn’t win yet again, there will be the usual entitled whining — the sound of which has been especially piercing since 2008, when Nobel Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl deemed American fiction “too isolated, too insular” and declared Europe “the centre of the literary world.”

Boy, were we upset. Over at Slate, Adam Kirsch penned a scathing essay declaring that “the Nobel committee has no clue about American literature,” arguing that Philip Roth should have won the prize. New Yorker editor David Remnick said, “You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lecture.” He added John Updike (then living) and Don DeLillo to the mix of worthy laureates.

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Asterix the Gaul co-creator draws an end to France’s comic hero

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Albert Uderzo gets pragmatix, hanging up his pen at 84 for younger illustrators to carry on the legacy.

Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Asterix the Gaul, is hanging up his pen at the age of 84.

But it is not the end of one of France’s greatest comic book heroes – Uderzo has found several successors to carry on his legacy.

The Italian-born artist, who dreamed up the indomitable warrior with his scriptwriter friend René Goscinny in 1959, said he was “a bit tired” after 52 years of drawing and that it was time to hand over his creation to younger talent.

The announcement on Tuesday came on the day that publishing house Hachette celebrated the sale of 350m Asterix books around the world, making the diminutive hero one of France’s biggest-selling exports.

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The Dog-Eared Paperback, Newly Endangered in an E-Book Age

Brian Snyder/Reuters A Kindle reader on a train in Cambridge, Mass. E-book best-seller lists are full of genre novels.

By JULIE BOSMAN

These are dark and stormy times for the mass-market paperback, that squat little book that calls to mind the beach and airport newsstands.

Recession-minded readers who might have picked up a quick novel in the supermarket or drugstore are lately resisting the impulse purchase. Shelf space in bookstores and retail chains has been turned over to more expensive editions, like hardcovers and trade paperbacks, the sleeker, more glamorous cousin to the mass-market paperback. And while mass-market paperbacks have always been prized for their cheapness and disposability, something even more convenient has come along: the e-book.

A comprehensive survey released last month by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group revealed that while the publishing industry had expanded over all, publishers’ mass-market paperback sales had fallen 14 percent since 2008.

“Five years ago, it was a robust market,” said David Gernert, a literary agent whose clients include John Grisham, a perennial best seller in mass market. “Now it’s on the wane, and e-books have bitten a big chunk out of it.”

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