How do brand names differ from other names, and what goes into making a good name great and a bad name ghastly? Knowing this can spell the difference between bankruptcy and marketplace triumph. In this indispensable guide, the authors share the secrets of successful brand names-how they've indelibly stamped cultures around the world; who makes them; why they're made; and how they're compiled, bought, sold, and protected. The book outlines what kind of names exist-the initialized, descriptive, allusive, and coined. How namers surf on brainwaves. The do's, don'ts, and nevers of naming, how the structure of names is built from the ground up and how their sounds are engineered. Why names symbolize benefits. Where in the world brands may be found, and what will become of them. Fast-paced, illustration-packed, gazing at the past and probing into the future, this is the definitive book on naming. The Making of A Name is the one book anyone interested in "owned words" must have. "Right now, all over America, millions of freelancers are starting companies, inventing products and marketing their services. Whether they're laid-off dot-com kids or unfulfilled Boomers, they have one thing in common-they all need names. Sadly for them, there's no book on the market that lays out the process. Rivkin and Sutherland's book will fill that gap. It's packed with useful 'how to' as well as tales both inspiring and cautionary: back-stories on the brand names we know-and why we love or hate them." -Laurie Pollock, formerly Senior Partner, Planning Director at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising in New York

A father reflects on the rich life of his son, who died suddenly at twenty-six after living with schizophrenia. On the morning of Boxing Day 2009, the poet Fraser Sutherland and his wife found their son, Malcolm, dead in his bedroom in their house. He was twenty-six and had died from a seizure of unknown cause. Malcolm had been living with schizophrenia since the age of seventeen. Fraser's respectful narration of Malcolm's life -- his happiness as well as his sufferings, his heroic efforts to calm his troubled mind, his readings, his writings, his experiments with religious thought -- is a master writer's attempt to give shape and dignity to his son's life, to memorialize it as more than an illness. And in writing about his son's life, Fraser creates his own self-effacing memoir -- the memoir of a parent's resilience through years of stressful care. Fraser Sutherland, one of Canada's finest poetry critics and essayists, died shortly after completing this book. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

When a Slovenian teenager sneaked into Austria in 1956, it was the start of an epic journey to Canada that almost ended before it started. First, young Ivan Letnik had to overcome cancer. Landing penniless the next year in Toronto, he worked his way up from golf-club dishwasher to greasy-spoon proprietor. Building on success, this non-stop worker bought the Normac, a former Detroit fire tug, and turned it into a floating restaurant on the barren Toronto waterfront. Restless for expansion he did not stop there. Twelve years later, he bought a Yugoslav cruise ship, the Jadran, and led a crew to sail it across the stormy North Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence Seaway, launching his second seafood venture at the foot of Yonge Street in Toronto. But in 1981 a city excursion ferry, veering off course, rammed and sank the Normac. It did not sink the man who called himself Captain John, though. Battling financial reverses, he kept dishing out clam chowder to boatloads of tourists when he was not hosting an annual dinner to feed the homeless. "The Man Who Stayed Afloat" tells his triumphant Canadian story.