Kenilworth Books is pleased to sponsor

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly

~ a talk by John Kay

on Friday 14th May 2010, 7.30 pm 
at The Holiday Inn, Abbey End, Kenilworth

“Original, widely-applicable concept from one of the world’s foremost economists.  Obliquity will be the Tipping Point for the new decade”
(Publishing March 2010)

If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in another.  This is the concept of obliquity.  Paradoxical as it sounds, many goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly.  Whether overcoming geographical obstacles, winning decisive battles, or meeting sales targets, history shows that oblique approaches are the most successful, especially in difficult terrain.  Pre-eminent economist, John Kay, applies his provocative, universal theory to everything from international business to town planning and from football to managing forest fires.  He shows why the most profitable companies are not always the most profit-orientated; why the richest men and women are not the most materialistic; and why the happiest people are not necessarily those who focus on happiness.

John Kay is a visiting professor at LSE and a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford.  A former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, he was the first director of the Said Business School, Oxford, is a regular columnist for the Financial Times, and author of numerous books.  His new book, ‘Obliquity: Why Our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly’, goes on sale in March 2010 and John will be signing copies at his talk.

Tickets priced at £5 are available via the Kenilworth Festival website, by ringing Oxboffice on 0845 680 1926 or from Kenilworth Books.

Kenilworth Books is pleased to sponsor

‘On Roads : A Hidden History’ 

~ a talk by Jo Moran

on Saturday 15th May 2010, 17:00 hrs
at Kenilworth Library, Smalley Place, Kenilworth

Joe Moran is a social and cultural historian based at Liverpool John Moores University with a particular interest in the commonplace.  He regularly writes for The Guardian and the New Statesmen about British everyday life, from mid-twentieth century to the present day.

His talk for the Kenilworth Festival, ‘On Roads: A Hidden History’ is a study of roads “as cultural artefacts as much as concrete ones”, which psychoanalyses post-war Britain through its road-network. We use roads every day, yet we have no idea of why our journeys are the way they are – of how roads are built, signposted, mapped or numbered.  In unravelling this history, Joe will throw a whole new light onto our history and our daily lives.

Using a unique blend of travel writing, anthropology, history and social observation, he explores how Britain’s roads have their roots in unexpected places.  He looks at the Roman role in the way our roads are numbered, the ancient sat-nav systems of China of 2600BC, and the unknown demonstrations against by-passes in the 1920’s, and ends up with more current arguments about road pricing and road rage.

Full of quirky history, this talk also celebrates the overlooked people whose work we take for granted, such as Percy Shaw, the inventor of the cats eye, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, the designers of the road sign system and Charles Forte, the entrepreneur behind the service station.

Copies of the book “On Roads: A Hidde History” will be available for sale at the talk to be signed by the author.

Tickets priced at £5 are available via the Kenilworth Festival website, by ringing Oxboffice on 0845 680 1926 or from Kenilworth Books.

“A book that is fresh and original… Moran is terrific on all the quirky nonsense” – Matthew Angel, Financial Times

“Wonderful.  Joe Moran is the master of turning the mundane realities of everyday life into the stuff of history.” – Dominic Sandbrook

“Jo Moran’s terrific book is an imaginative history : a study of roads ‘as cultural artefacts as much as concrete ones’, which psychoanalyses post-war Britain through its road-network.” The Guardian

‘Joe Moran has a genius for turning the prosaic poetic – this is a tone poem in tarmac. Motorway journeys will never be so dull again. A treat.’ Peter Hennessy, author of ‘Having It So Good’.”

Read with your children and don’t have a TV in the bedroom!

 A Talk by Gervase Phinn at The Woodside Tuesday March 30^th

 On Tuesday March 30^th Gervase Phinn, author, retired School Inspector and raconteur visited Kenilworth and talked to an audience of just over 100 at The Woodside, Glassshouse Lane.  He was here as part of a whirlwind tour of the country to launch his autobiography, “Road to the Dales: The story of a Yorkshire Lad.” 

 Gervase talked to the spellbound audience of his magical childhood and schooldays and regaled us with personal stories both funny and touching, happy and heartbreaking.  His father read stories with him from a very early age, recited poetry and was obviously an inspiring raconteur.  His mother played the piano and they were a very close-knit family.  Life was not always perfect and Gervase was bullied at school, but he had some inspirational teachers who set him on the right road and taught him a love of words and learning which he has carried with him throughout a very successful career.  He has a sharp ear for dialogue as anyone who has read his previous books about his work as a Schools Inspector in the Yorkshire Dales will know.  He even does the voices, so we had Scots and Irish as well as Yorkshire on Tuesday evening!

When asked by a member of the audience how we can encourage in our children a love of reading, he suggested reading with your children, telling stories with them and not allowing a television in the bedroom.  He described how there were sometimes pages missing from the books his father managed to get for them at home, so he made up the missing bits, and it was thus that the ending to some classics the Phinn family knew was sometimes better than the original!  His Dad would also refuse to continue the story if he had promised to read only so far, so the children were left with a cliff-hanger until the next night. 

 The evening was arranged by Kenilworth Books as a taster for the Kenilworth Festival in May. We have organised four more “Meet the Author” events and five children’s events for the festival which runs from Saturday 8^th May until Sunday 16^th May .Details of all the events can be found on the Kenilworth Festival website or at www.warwickbooks.net.

Patti Smith comes to Leamington!

One of our favourite publishers Bloomsbury recently asked us to support a Patti Smith event at the terrific venue of the Assembly Rooms in Leamington and being children of the sixties ourselves we naturally jumped at the chance. What a super evening we had. Patti, pictured here with Frances, was the loveliest lady you could imagine. She was here to read from her newly published biography of her years with Robert Mapplethorpe Just Kids and of course to sing. She signed 200 books for us, and if you’re lucky we may have just one or two signed copies left. But they were selling like hot cakes to the packed and appreciative audience who really enjoyed this trip down  beat/ rock/ punk/poetry lane.

Just to show how iconic a star Patti is, she is shortly attending the annual Pop Music Awards, taking place April 21, 2010 at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles, California. where she will be presented with the prestigious American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Founders Award.

The ASCAP Founders Award is among the most prestigious honors that ASCAP gives to songwriters and composers who have made pioneering contributions to music by inspiring and influencing their fellow music creators. Each recipient is a musical innovator who possesses a unique style of creative genius and past recipients include Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Heart’s Ann & Nancy Wilson, Billy Joel, Annie Lennox, Sir Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Smokey Robinson, Steely Dan, James Taylor, Tom Waits, Stevie Wonder and Neil Young.

Commenting on the award to Smith, ASCAP President and Chairman Paul Williams said: “Patti fused raw rock energy with the heart of a poet and ignited the 1970s New York punk scene. She expanded the boundaries of artistic expression, musically and otherwise, inspiring generations of rockers worldwide. She continues to be a vibrant, prolific artist, working in a wide variety of media. We are very proud to honor Patti Smith with ASCAP’s Founders Award.”

The stunning 1920’s art-deco venue where Patti performed is the brainchild of music industry entrepreneur Nigel Dally who invested £3.2 million pounds to renovate and restore the venue to its former glory with the help of renowned designer Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen. Since opening, the one thousand capacity venue has earned itself the coveted title of best live performance venue for its accommodating, yet intimate atmosphere along with its technologically advanced light and sound systems and brilliant interior design………if you haven’t been, you must! We were lucky enough to be shown round the backstage area by Nigel which along with three changing rooms, an artist bar, a World War II Gatling Gun, pool tables and dodgems, also plays host to the original pink gypsy caravan belonging to none other than Country music sensation Tammy Wynette. Fabulous!

At the Firefly Gate by Linda Newbery

This was a gentle and touching story which some of us really liked and some of us found a bit frustrating. It’s quite mysterious and we all found it very intriguing and atmospheric in places. Some of us found it very poignant and quite moving. There is a good strong set of distinctive characters and some of the description is very engaging and drew us in with vibrant visual detail. But there seemed to us to be quite a number of blind alleys in the story. What was the point of the visit to the airfield? Why was it important for Henry to go to the village school for a day? Why was it simply accepted that Grace was so unpleasant? Although we appreciated that she was secretly in a state about Dotty’s imminent death, we couldn’t quite see why her horrible behaviour was completely ignored by the adults. Above all, why was Dotty killed off before Henry had told her his story? We were puzzled. We thought perhaps this was a book in which real things happened rather than neat story book things – people do die most inconveniently in real life and horrible people do get away with terrible things without anyone noticing – but somehow we felt a bit cheated – or some of us did!

Nonetheless, we did on the whole enjoy this book – it’s puzzling but pleasant and well-written, light and summery and yet thought-provoking and absorbing.

Our next meeting will be on May 18^th at 4.15pm and we will be discussing ‘Impossible’ by Nancy Werlin.