2012.4.24 NEW ARRIVALS

All Business Is Local: Why Place Matters More Than Ever in a Global, Virtual World

AUTHOR : John A. Quelch

PUBLISHER : Portfolio

Why businesses should never underestimate the power of place.

Today’s business leaders are so obsessed with all things global and virtual that they risk neglecting the critical impact of physical place.

It’s a paradox of the Internet age: Now that it’s possible for businesses to be everywhere at once, they need to focus on what it means to be in one specific place at a time.

The best global brands, from IBM to McDonald’s, are by design also the leading local brands.

For instance, your decision to patronize Starbucks will depend on whether it’s the best local coffee shop in your neighborhood, not on how many thousands of global locations it has.

Marketing experts John Quelch and Katherine Jocz offer a new way to think about place in every strategic decision.

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

AUTHOR : Robert K. Massie

PUBLISHER : Random House

The Pulitzer Prize?winning author of “Peter the Great,” “Nicholas and Alexandra” and “The Romanovs” returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure young German princess who traveled to Russia at fourteen and rose to become one of the most remarkable, powerful and captivating women in history.

Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into Empress of Russia by sheer determination.

Possessing a brilliant mind and an insatiable curiosity as a young woman, she devoured the works of Enlightenment philosophers and, when she reached the throne, attempted to use their principles to guide her reign of the vast yet backward Russian empire.

The Moment: A Novel

AUTHOR : Douglas Kennedy

PUBLISHER : Atria Books

From the New York Times best-selling author of “Leaving the World” comes a tragic love story set in Berlin in the cold war.

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced writer in the midst of a rueful middle age.

Living a very private life in Maine, in touch only with his daughter and still trying to recover from the end of a long marriage, his solitude is disrupted one wintry morning by the arrival of a box that is postmarked Berlin.

The name on the box - Dussmann - unsettles him completely, for it belongs to the woman with whom he had an intense love affair 26 years ago in Berlin at a time when the city was cleaved in two and personal and political allegiances were frequently haunted by the deep shadows of the cold war.

Refusing initially to confront what he might find in that box, Thomas nevertheless is forced to grapple with a past he has never discussed with any living person and the full, extraordinary force of true love.