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Bookshelf Just the opening chapter of Listen Up Click Here is enough to make a reader's head spin with the giddy possibilities of the future of marketing. In that chapter, authors David Verklin and Bernice Kanner predict the future of advertis- ing as it will irrevocably be changed by new media and new methods of consuming them. As con- sumers flock to on-demand TV, watch videos over their cell phones, and drive past billboards whose LED displays are custom- ized to suit the radio station that's on in the car, marketers will need a whole new strategy to reach them. "Empowered by technology, people will be even more agnostic about, and promiscuous with, their use of and control over media," write Verk- lin and Kanner. "'Eyeballs'—audi- ence size and raw impressions—used to matter. By 2008, engagement (involvement) will be the metric that matters to marketers." In suc- cessive chapters, the authors analyze what's happening today in various media, from television to newspaper to Wikipedia, with a wealth of detail and insider knowledge. The book is simultaneously fun and mind-bog- gling, written with zest and bursting with ideas. (Wiley, $24.95) Publishing research is a key part of most professors' job descriptions, but some of them find it much easier to collect data than to write about it. Paul J. Silvia's breezy little book, How to Write a Lot, helps academ- ics turn themselves into authors 64 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007 by offering practical, useful advice about setting schedules, meet- ing goals, and avoiding common mistakes of bad writing. Silvia is a psychologist who assumes many of his readers will be psychologists, too, but his lessons are perfectly apt for fascinating journey. In his contribu- tion on "The Civil War and Recon- struction," Jeffrey Rogers Hummel shows how paying for the war led to all sorts of shifts in government, many of them permanent and not all of them related to finance. For instance, the printing of paper money during the 1860s led to a surge in counterfeiters, and the Secret Service was first organized to hunt them any faculty member struggling to produce a book, a paper, or a grant proposal. As an added bonus, the book is a delightful read. "Revising while you generate text is like drink- ing decaffeinated coffee in the early morning: noble idea, wrong time," Silvia writes. "Your first drafts should sound like they were hastily trans- lated from Icelandic by a nonnative speaker." Any would-be writer can benefit from such advice. (American Psychological Association, $14.95) They say that history is written by the winners, but history might be even more interesting when it's written by the economists. Government and the American Economy is just such an exercise, a selection of 17 essays offered by Price Fish- back and 15 other authors, most of them economics professors. Between them, they break down and examine the major periods of American history, from Colonial times to the Civil War to the post- World War II era, always looking at how governmental policies shaped the economy and vice versa. It's a down. "This illustrates that more often than not, if one traces the origin of some government agency seemingly unrelated to national defense, one discovers that it arose in the fertile soil of war," Hummel writes. It's an eye-opening view. (The University of Chicago Press, $85 clothbound, $35 paperback) The teen years are tumultuous times for humans, and that goes double for corporations. In No Man's Land, Doug Tatum describes the rough adolescence of rapidly growing com- panies that are "too big to be small, too small to be big." To navigate this harsh terrain, he says, business owners must master the four M's: They must understand the transition occurring in their market; address the management changes required by their growth; test their model for profitability; and understand how to attract the needed money. Tatum also offers four possible outcomes that follow hard on the heels of any rapid expansion. The entrepreneur might decide to stay small. He might con- tinue to grow, though that requires W atch This