Find Out What It Was REALLY Like For the "Mad Women"

An inside look at what it was really like to be an ad woman on Madison Avenue in the 60s and 70s, from casual sex to professional serfdom, in this immensely entertaining and bittersweet memoir

Mad Women is a tell-all account of life in the New York advertising world of the 1960s and 70s from Jane Maas, a female copywriter who succeeded in the primarily male environment portrayed by the hit TV show Mad Men.

Fans of the show are dying to know how accurate it is: did people really have that much sex in the office? Were there really three-martini lunches? Were women really second-class citizens? Jane Maas says the answer to all three questions is unequivocally yes. And her book, based on her own experiences and countless interviews with her peers, gives the full stories, from the junior account man whose wife nearly left him when she found the copy of Screw magazine he’d used to find "entertainment" for a client, to the Ogilvy & Mather agency’s legendary annual sex-and-booze filled Boat Ride, from which it was said no virgin ever returned intact. Wickedly funny and full of juicy inside information, Mad Women also tackles the tougher issues of the era, such as equal pay, rampant jaw-dropping sexism, and the difficult choice many women faced between motherhood and their careers.

Read an interview with the author HERE.

TC Tidbits: Book Shelf Love

check them out HERE

What Would the World be Like if Everyone Could Read?

Learn more about World Read Aloud Day 2012 and LitWorld.com HERE.

From Page To Plate

"Here's some advice. Stay alive." --Haymitch Abernathy

When it comes to The Hunger Games, staying alive means finding food any way possible. Katniss and Gale hunt live game, Peeta's family survives on the bread they make, and the inhabitants of the Seam work twelve-hour days for a few handfuls of grain--all while the residents of the Capitol gorge themselves on delicacies and desserts to the heart's desire.

For the first time, you will be able to create delicious recipes from the humble District 12 to the extravagant Capital, including: French Bread from the Mellark Family Bakery, Katniss's Favorite Lamb Stew with Dried Plums, Rue's Roasted Parsnips, Gale's Bone-Pickin' Big Game Soup, Capitol-Grade Dark Chocolate Cake

If you're starving for more from Katniss, Peeta, and Gale, this cookbook is sure to whet your appetite.

TC Tidbit: Humans Have A Need To Read

read the article HERE.

"{This book's} narrative moves forward with an aura of malevolence to a conclusion too close to reality to be anything but believable. Minimal gun-flourishing, minimal violence, maximum moral quandary." --Kirkus Reviews

Racing between London and Moscow, Kazakstan and the Caymans, The Silent Oligarch reveals a sinister unexplored world where the wealthy buy the justice they want—and the silence they need.  Here private spy agencies duel for dominance, governments eagerly defer to the highest bidder, and colossal wealth is amassed through shadowy networks of companies. But where the money actually flows—and who benefits from such corruption—is something necessarily hidden, sometimes in plain sight.

Behind the imposing splendor of the Kremlin rises a run-down office building, home to the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources. A nondescript bureaucrat in a drab government agency, Konstanin Malin secretly controls a vast business that dominates the nation’s oil industry, making him one of the most feared and wealthy men in Russia.  Over the years Malin has siphoned billions from the state and poured them into his private empire, hiding what he owns offshore.

The man who has done the hiding is Richard Lock, a diffident English lawyer whose life in Moscow is falling apart: criss-crossing the world administering his master’s affairs, he has seen his relationships with his estranged family and highly practical mistress slowly deteriorating. Lock is bound to Malin by marriage, complacency, greed, and most of all by a complex lie that neither can escape. But slowly, Lock is beginning to realise that the lie will not always hold. 

Once an idealistic young journalist, Benjamin Webster now works as an investigator at a London corporate intelligence firm, a mercenary spy for the rich and powerful. Webster’s cynicism and anger were born when he witnessed a colleague murdered in Russia for asking too many tough questions; now, ten years later, he may finally be able to avenge her unsolved murder. Hired by a client to ruin Malin, he discovers that this shadowy figure may have arranged his friend’s gruesome death—to hide a terrible secret buried at the heart of his criminal empire.

Soon Webster realizes that Lock is Malin’s great weakness; and when he starts to apply pressure, Lock’s fragile world begins to crack. His colleagues begin dying mysteriously, his relationship with Malin turns ominously ice-cold. The police begin asking questions, the newspapers smell blood in the water, and Webster’s investigators close in on the truth. Suddenly Lock is running for his life—though from Malin or Webster, the law or his own past, he couldn’t say.

A heart-pounding hunt around the world, through opulent boardrooms and anonymous hotels, The Silent Oligarch is a chilling and unforgettable novel of our time.

"Two parts Too Big to Fail, one part The Devil Wears Prada, Alger’s debut is taut and compelling..."--Publishers Weekly

A sophisticated page-turner about a wealthy New York family embroiled in a financial scandal with cataclysmic consequences.

Now that he's married to Merrill Darling, daughter of billionaire financier Carter Darling, attorney Paul Ross has grown accustomed to New York society and all of its luxuries: a Park Avenue apartment, weekends in the Hamptons, bespoke suits. When Paul loses his job, Carter offers him the chance to head the legal team at his hedge fund. Thrilled with his good fortune in the midst of the worst financial downturn since the Great Depression, Paul accepts the position.

But Paul's luck is about to shift: a tragic event catapults the Darling family into the media spotlight, a regulatory investigation, and a red-hot scandal with enormous implications for everyone involved. Suddenly, Paul must decide where his loyalties lie-will he save himself while betraying his wife and in-laws or protect the family business at all costs?

Cristina Alger's glittering debut novel interweaves the narratives of the Darling family, two eager SEC attorneys, and a team of journalists all racing to uncover-or cover up-the truth. With echoes of a fictional Too Big to Fail and the novels of Dominick Dunne, The Darlings offers an irresistible glimpse into the highest echelons of New York society-a world seldom seen by outsiders-and a fast-paced thriller of epic proportions.

Read an article about the author HERE.

Meet the Darlings HERE.

Read an excerpt HERE.