“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.” 

- Santiago, The Alchemist

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Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1947. His books have sold over 150 million copies in more than 170 countries and been translated into 73 languages. 

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“No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.” ​

- Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

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"It now becomes your duty to try and separate the facts from the fancy." 

- Judge, Twelve Angry Men

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Reginald Rose (1920 - 2002) was born and raised in Manhattan. He enlisted in 1943  after Pearl Harbor and served in the Pacific until 1946.

In 1954, Rose received a jury duty summons to a manslaughter case. The jurors took eight hours of heated argument to ultimately deliver the unanimous verdict; Rose, a writer since his teen years, thought the scenario would make an excellent television play. 

Rose also wrote a story titled The Incredible World of Horace Ford, which was adapted as an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963. 

Terence Rattigan
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William Gibson
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Maxwell Anderson
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"I consider my six or seven years at Disney's the greatest art school in the world...There is no other place where such a vast number of the very best artists all worked in the same studio."

— Eyvind Earle

"Beauty is the thing we are all searching for...Whatever beauty is, I feel it, and as long as I can I shall try to find more and more beauty, and to put it down so others can see what I have seen." 

— Eyvind Earle (1916 - 2000)

I first heard the name 'Ogilvy' six years ago on some forgotten episode of Mad Men. Intrigued by the idea of potentially meeting a real-life Don Draper, I cracked open the cover of Confessions of an Advertising Man the next day. Inside were some of the most juiciest secrets on business, leadership, and life, putting Don Draper's own to shame; namely, the practical value of honesty in work and at home. 

I (re)read at least one of his a year. Confessions is high-level; witty, eloquent, and mindset-shaping. On Advertising is the bottom level; tactical, creative and packed with direct, actionable instruction. Blood is philosophical, psychological; meditative. A holy trinity of the genius that is 'the father of modern advertising.' But The Unpublished David Ogilvy, republished in 2012, fills in more gaps of the man —the agency he built, the ads he created, and the culture of creativity he nurtured — for 58 years via a mosaic of impressionistic tiles in the form of letters, notes, memos, speeches, ads, interviews, and photographs. 

The man loved lists. Hierarchical ones. Ones that cut through and capture the essence of a thing. And he hated paper clips. Most interestingly though, Unpublished delves beneath the hood of Ogilvy and Mather's legendary corporate culture and explores its core features, ending on an insightful look at the desperate need for and priceless value of leadership. 

If you only read one of Ogilvy's, oh, hell, don't make me choose. Just grab one. It'll sell the others. [JG]
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After dropping out of his English college and moving to France to cook 'in a great kitchen' for 68 hours a week, David Ogilvy then returned to the home island to sell Aga cookers door-to-door. He next cut his teeth in consumer research with George Gallup at the Audience Research Institute in New Jersey.

At 38, like the man's autobiographical note above, he took a left turn into a copywriter chair at the London ad agency Mather and Crowther. During WWII, he served in the field of espionage and wartime propaganda at Camp X, successfully sabotaging the reputation of business supplying the Nazis with industrial materials.

After the war, and a full decade at Gallup, Ogilvy started his own agency with the support of Mather and Crowther. In ten years, he turned $6,000 into over $60+ million in billings on Madison Avenue. Ogilvy is known as 'the father of modern advertising' and his book Confessions of an Advertising Man, a tongue-in-cheek-titled, tour-de-force book on business ethics published in '63, remains a perennial seller to this day.
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12. "Companies that have cultivated their individual identities by shaping values, making heroes, spelling out rites and rituals, and acknowledging the cultural network have an edge."

11. "The mass of people are skeptical of a great man, especially one with a great mind. They would rather vote for someone who is mediocre, like themselves."

10. "Every advertisement must tell the whole sales story, because the public does not read advertisements in series." 

9. "Study the best time of for calling; between twelve and two p.m. you will not be welcome, whereas a call out an unorthodox time of day — after supper in the summer for instance — will often succeed ... In general, study the methods of your competitors and do the exact opposite." 

8. "Escape from the sterile influences of dons, who are nothing more than pickled undergraduates." — Advice to to his 18-year-old great nephew about whether to attend university or enter the work force

7. "Whenever you write a commercial, bear in mind that is is likely to be seen by your children, your wife — and your conscience." 

6. "Every advertisement is part of the long-term investment in your personality." — Burleigh Gardner and Sidney Levy, Harvard Business Review

5. "We have exercised care in selecting our clients. That is why our roster is such a remarkable one. Wee seek clients who manufacture a product which we can be proud to advertise — a product which we can recommend without reservation to our own families. We seek clients whose basic attitudes to business are about the same as ours. The agency-client relationship is an intimate one, and it only works well when there is a strong ingredient of mutual respect on both sides." 

4. "We have a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamp post, for support, not for illumination." 

3. "I would like all of you to make a New Years Resolution. Cut your wordage in half. This will make it possible for us to finish our homework before midnight." 

2. "Whatever you do in life, however humble, is OK if you do it right." 

1. "I believe in the Scottish proverb: "Hard work never killed a man." Men die of boredom, psychological conflict and disease. They never die of hard work." 
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Nothing against Harry Potter, but for me, A Series of Unfortunate Events takes the cake. Long before the Netflix series and the (much better) movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Jim Carrey, there were 13 books. And each book had thirteen chapters, recounting the journeys of three orphans, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. In Book 1 (and 2-13) they must escape from Count Olaf's never-ending plots to steal their inheritance fortune, and seek out the truth about their parents' mysterious deaths. And then there is Lemony Snicket himself. 

The coy and quirky detective-narrator, the one assembling this series of unfortunate events for us the readers; for me, he is the most interesting part of the novels. Each book begins with an ominous dedication page to a woman known only as Beatrice, Snicket's lover, (For example, To Beatrice—darling, dearest, dead.), and the enigmatic persona grows from there, weaving through the chapters via a series of self-referential, fourth-wall-breaking moments, that halt the Baudelaire's strict narrative, yet offer witty vocabulary sessions, philosophical quips, and deliberately-over-the-top flourishes to heighten the ominous, sinister tone of the story's world; simultaneously undoing that tone. 

The Bad Beginning is one hell of a fun read. Leaning on the author's back-cover description, "In this short book alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast." Rereading it eighteen years later, I still laughed out loud at times and can't wait to dive into Lemony Snicket's other series, All the Wrong Questions, a spoof of kid-detective and noir genres.

"​With all due respect." [JG]
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5. "In the time since the Baudelaire parents' death, most of the Baudelaire orphan's friends had fallen by the wayside, an expression which here means "they stopped calling, writing, and stopping by to see any of the Baudelaires, making them very lonely." You and I, of course, would never do this to any of our grieving acquaintances, but it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friend sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed." 

4. "Unless you are a lawyer, it will probably strike you as off that Count Olaf's plan was defeated byViolet signing with her left hand instead of her right. But the law is an odd thing. For instance, one country in Europe has a law that requires all its bakers to sell bread at the exact same price. A certain island has a law that forbids anyone from removing its fruit. And a town not too fare from where you live has a law bars me from coming within five miles of its borders..." 

3. "For most of the afternoon, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny cooked the puttanesca sauce according to the recipe. Violet roasted the garlic and washed and chopped the anchovies. Klaus peeled the tomatoes and pitted the olives. Sunny banged on a pot with a wooden spoon, singing a rather repetitive song she had written herself." 

2. "[Count] Olaf's eyes were shining bright as if he already had an idea." 

1. "The morning's note from Count Olaf ordered them to chop firewood in the backyard, and as Violet and Klaus swung the axe down over each log to break it into smaller pieces, they discussed possible plans of action, while Sunny chewed meditatively on a small piece of wood." 

"It is a pleasure to see young people interested in books..." 

- Justice Strauss, The Bad Beginning
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Coralie Bickford-Smith
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