In Follow the Story, bestselling author and journalist James B. Stewart teaches you the techniques of compelling narrative writing.

It is the indispensable guide to writing successful nonfiction books, articles, feature stories, or memoirs. Stewart provides concrete directions for conceiving, reporting, structuring, and writing nonfiction -- techniques that he has used in his own successful books and stories. By using examples from his own work, Stewart illustrates systematically a way of thinking about and executing stories, a method that has helped numerous reporters and Columbia students become better writers.

Follow the Story examines in detail:

• How an idea is conceived
• How to "sell" ideas to editors and publishers
• How to report the nonfiction story
• Six models that can be used for any nonfiction story
• How to structure the narrative story
• How to write introductions, endings, dialogue, and description
• How to introduce and develop characters
• How to use literary devices
• Pitfalls to avoid

Learn from this book a clear way of looking at the world with the alert curiosity that is the first indispensable step toward good writing.

Winner of the Anne M. Sperber Prize

A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his time

After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited an astonishing list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carre, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton--not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. In Avid Reader, Gottlieb writes with wit and candor about succeeding William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb is still at it--editing, anthologizing, and, to his surprise, writing.

But this account of a life founded upon reading is about more than the arc of a singular career--one that also includes a lifelong involvement with the world of dance. It's about transcendent friendships and collaborations, "elective affinities" and family, psychoanalysis and Bakelite purses, the alchemical relationship between writer and editor, the glory days of publishing, and--always--the sheer exhilaration of work.

The 1970s are of particular relevance for understanding the socio-economic changes still shaping Western societies today. The collapse of traditional manufacturing industries like coal and steel, shipbuilding, and printing, as well as the rise of the service sector, contributed to a notable sense of decline and radical transformation. Building on the seminal work of Lutz Raphael and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Nach dem Boom, which identified a "social transformation of revolutionary quality" that ushered in "digital financial capitalism," this volume features a series of essays that reconsider the idea of a structural break in the 1970s. Contributors draw on case studies from France, the Netherlands, the UK, the US, and Germany to examine the validity of the "after the boom" hypothesis. Since the Boom attempts to bridge the gap between the English and highly productive German debates on the 1970s.

Tucked into the files of Iowa State University's Cooperative Extension Service is a small, innocuous looking pamphlet with the title Lenders: Working through the Farmer-Lender Crisis. Cooperative Extension Service intended this publication to improve bankers' empathy and communication skills, especially when facing farmers showing "Suicide Warning Signs." After all, they were working with individuals experiencing extreme economic distress, and each banker needed to learn to "be a good listener." What was important, too, was what was left unsaid. Iowa State published this pamphlet in April of 1986. Just four months earlier, farmer Dale Burr of Lone Tree, Iowa, had killed his wife, and then walked into the Hills Bank and Trust company and shot a banker to death in the lobby before taking shots at neighbors, killing one of them, and then killing himself. The unwritten subtext of this little pamphlet was "beware." If bankers failed to adapt to changing circumstances, the next desperate farmer might be shooting.This was Iowa in the 1980s. The state was at the epicenter of a nationwide agricultural collapse unmatched since the Great Depression. In When a Dream Dies, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg examines the lives of ordinary Iowa farmers during this period, as the Midwest experienced the worst of the crisis. While farms failed and banks foreclosed, rural and small-town Iowans watched and suffered, struggling to find effective ways to cope with the crisis. If families and communities were to endure, they would have to think about themselves, their farms, and their futures in new ways. For many Iowan families, this meant restructuring their lives or moving away from agriculture completely. This book helps to explain how this disaster changed children, families, communities, and the development of the nation's heartland in the late twentieth century. Agricultural crises are not just events that affect farms. When a Dream Dies explores the Farm Crisis of the 1980s from the perspective of the two-thirds of the state's agricultural population seriously affected by a farm debt crisis that rapidly spiraled out of their control. Riney-Kehrberg treats the Farm Crisis as a family event while examining the impact of the crisis on mental health and food insecurity and discussing the long-term implications of the crisis for the shape and function of agriculture.

The investigations of accidents and incidents is a core part of the field of safety management and this book sees a discussion of accidents and incidents and the legislation relevant to preventing, investigating and reporting these incidents. The author also takes a look at accident causation theories, accidents and their effects, accident prevention and reporting. The economic impact of accidents and incidents warrants a commitment to understanding and preventing these accidents and incidents and this book provides the knowledge with which this can be achieved.