"I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me" "Norwegian Wood" (Lennon/McCartney).

With Norwegian Wood Murakami, best known as the author of off-kilter classics such as the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland, finally achieved widespread acclaim in his native Japan. The novel sold upwards of 4 million copies and forced the author to retreat to Europe, fearful of the expectations accompanying his new-found cult status.

The novel is atypical for Murakami: seemingly autobiographical, in the tradition of many Japanese "I" novels, Norwegian Wood is a simple coming of age tale set, primarily, in 1969/70, the time of Murakami's own university years. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the backdrop of the novel but the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs and the pain (and pleasure) of growing up with all its attendant losses, (self-)obsessions and crises.

The novel is split into two volumes and beautifully presented here in a "gold" box containing both the green book and the red book. Young Japanese fans became so obsessed with the work that they would dress entirely in one or other colour denoting which volume they most identified with. And the novel is hugely affecting, reading like a cross between Plath's Bell Jar and Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women, if less complex and ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical, work. He captures the huge expectation of youth, and of this particular time in history, for the future and for the place of love in it. He also saturates the work with sadness, an emotion that can cripple a novel but which here underscores the poignancy of the work's rather thin subject matter. —Mark Thwaite

The reputation of an organization influences whether or not we buy from, work for, supply to and invest in that organization. This fourth edition of Risk Issues and Crisis Management in Public Relations defines reputation, explores how to value it, and provides practical guidelines for effectively managing it.

This latest edition features new sections on the effects of recent world events, Corporate Social Responsibility, climate change and sustainability, legal revisions and the use of the Internet in a crisis. Featuring new case studies on Oxfam & Starbucks, Sony, Dell, BP, and Wal-mart, the book charts how rapidly the reputation management agenda moves and yet how slowly business learns.

Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the net — presentationzen.com — shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today's world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.

A landmark exploration of the way out of extreme poverty for the world’s poorest citizens

Among the most eagerly anticipated books of any year, this landmark exploration of prosperity and poverty distills the life work of an economist Time calls one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Sachs’s aim is nothing less than to deliver a big picture of how societies emerge from poverty. To do so he takes readers in his footsteps, explaining his work in Bolivia, Russia, India, China, and Africa, while offering an integrated set of solutions for the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that challenge the poorest countries. Marrying passionate storytelling with rigorous analysis and a vision as pragmatic as it is fiercely moral, The End of Poverty is a truly indispensable work.

The Revolution will not be televised - it will be emailed, texted, blogged, wikied...

Welcome to the new future of involvement. Forming groups is easier than it's ever been: unpaid volunteers can bulid an encyclopedia together in their spare time, mistreated customers can join forces to get their revenge on airlines and high street banks, and one man with a laptop can raise an army to help recover a stolen phone.
The results of this new world of easy collaboration can be both good (young people defying oppresive government with a guerrilla ice-cream eating protest) and bad (girls sharing advice for staying dangerously skinny) but it's here and, as Clay Shirkey shows, it's affecting .... well, Everybody.

For the first time, we have the tools tomake group action truly a reality. And they're going to change our whole world.