Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Four hundred miles didn?t discourage me from arranging a memorable sixtieth birthday for my only sibling. I hadn 't celebrated Daniel 's birthday in over forty years. For at least twenty of those years, I 'd despised him. It wasn 't Daniel 's absences from Mom 's graduation ceremonies for undergraduate and graduate school that caused me to feel so negatively, though his failure to attend was reprehensible. For both events, I lived in Virginia and purchased a plane ticket before thinking to…

He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're so right, I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice.…

Neither Dale Carnegie nor the publishers, Simon and Schuster, anticipated more than this modest sale. To their amazement, the book became an overnight sensation, and edition after edition rolled off the presses to keep up with the increasing public demand. Now to Win Friends and InfEuence People took its place in publishing history as one of the all-time international best-sellers. It touched a nerve and filled a human need that was more than a faddish phenomenon of post-Depression days, as…